About MotifLab Play
What you can do
- Motif Studio — a motif is a small musical idea, and in MotifLab it is the hero of the story. Start from one of sixteen ready-made ideas (or a blank canvas), then grow it across the six stages of a story: Opening, Meet the Motif, Development, Contrast, Homecoming and Resolution. At each stage you watch — and can hear — your motif transform: it stretches to grow braver, flips to push against something, plays backwards to look home, and shrinks to settle at the end. Save your finished pieces to this device.
- Variation Detective — see an original idea and a variation of it side by side, then work out which move a composer used: inversion (flip it), retrograde (reverse it), augmentation (stretch it), diminution (shrink it), or transposition (move it). Every answer is worked out from the notes themselves, so it is always fair — and a hint appears after a first try.
- Concept rounds — quick question sets on the composer's tools, the six-stage story arc, and the nine building blocks of music (rhythm, harmony, key, texture, dynamics, bass, timbre, counter-melody and cadence), at your own pace.
It works with the sound off
Sound is a bonus, not a requirement. Every motif is drawn as a little chart — higher bars are higher notes, wider bars are longer notes — so you can see the whole idea and every transformation with your eyes. Turn the sound on any time you like to hear it too; it stays off until you tap a play button. So you can compose on a muted device, or if you are deaf or hard of hearing.
Meet the characters
Trill is a small musical idea who is the hero of every piece — changing across the six stages and still being itself. Trill's friends each stand for one building block of music: Clap is rhythm, Meld is harmony, Nest is the home key, Ply is texture, Surge is dynamics, Thrum is the bass, Tint is tone colour, Twine is the counter-melody, and Wend is the way a phrase comes to rest. Read their stories →
Our privacy promise
MotifLab Play is free, works offline, and collects nothing. No accounts, no ads, no tracking. Your progress and the pieces you save stay on this device — nothing leaves it.