Google site allows you to waste time while creating wonderful music

Please don’t tell my boss, but there are few things one can do at work that are more enjoyable than wasting time. There are various ways to do that, of course, be it browsing the internet, getting lost down the rabbit hole that is YouTube, or being unable to look away from Facebook or Twitter or any other social media site. You can also learn origami and turn your documents into beautiful paper animals, but that seems like a lot of work. Anyway, the point is there is no shortage of ways in which we can get distracted, and if you are the kind of person who has plenty of free time or is not concerned with losing a job, we would like to introduce you to a new time waster that is as pleasant as it is fun.

Who doesn’t like making music with just a few clicks?

Ever the company to have a bit of fun, Google unveiled “Song Maker,” which is a site that does pretty much what you would think. Using any browser you want, once the page loads, you will see a clean page with a bunch of empty boxes. Click (or tap, if you are on a mobile device) whichever ones you’d like to see and set different color-coded keys. It looks like this: Fortunately, you will hear the sound each note makes the second you click on it, so you’ll have an idea of what kind of song you are creating while you are in the process of creating it. Along with deciding on which notes will be played, you also have options for style of music, choosing between marimba, piano, strings, woodwind and synth, along with another row of sounds that can be added. In that group, you can pick from electronic, blocks, kit and conga. You are also free to adjust your song’s tempo, which you can do with a slider, and in the settings, you can adjust length, beats per bar, scale, range and other things. The end result looks something like this: Once finished with your symphony, you can save it before sharing it on social media. Song Maker is just one part of Google’s experimental Music Lab in which you can play around and do all sorts of fun musically-themed things online. We would provide links to all of those, too, but we’re here to help you waste some time — not lose your job.