Free online music lessons for Beginners

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Free Online Music Courses

These free music courses require no tuition payments or registration. In order to take full advantage of the courses, users may need specific software applications to access video and audio offerings. Quality speakers or headphones may be beneficial when listening to music clips and samples.

Annenberg Learner

This 12-video instructional series in Exploring the World of Music is appropriate for high school through adult students, as well as teachers. By watching half-hour videos, students examine topics like sound and environment, learning music, melody, harmony and music memory, as well as music composers and technology. Related print and audio/video media are also available for a fee.

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Voice students learn the importance of posture, breathing, warming up, clear enunciation/articulation and frequent practice while investigating the videos on the Learn to Sing site. Learners may also access a 6-video tutorial for breathing exercises and fine-tuning strategies. The lessons include exercises and demonstrational videos.

Children's Music Workshop

The Online Music Theory Game offers aspiring musicians a variety of lessons and trainers on multiple instruments. The lessons examine sheet music and provide video instructions in areas such as note duration, major and minor scales, key signatures and meter.

Emory University

Courtney Brown, Ph.D., presents 23 lessons covering such topics as patriotic music, protest music and labor music in this course. Students may view the podcasts through iTunes to learn how music transmits political ideas and possibly leads to political transformation.

Harvard University

In 6 lectures that span more than 11 hours, the composer Leonard Bernstein discusses musical topics such as syntax, semantics and phonology, in addition to what he called 'the crisis of the 20th century'. Learners may view the videos through iTunes or YouTube. Interested parties may also purchase these lectures in DVD or print format on Amazon.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction to Music Composition is an undergraduate course that broaches topics such as classical music of various cultures, jazz, graphing sound, timbre, electronic music and rhythm. While studying Music and Technology, undergraduate students will examine the aesthetics and history of music and technology during the last several centuries. Select video lectures and audio music clips are available.

Graduate students, or those with backgrounds in composition, may want to take advantage of the Music Composition course. Composition projects in melodic writing, counterpoint, melody/accompaniment, timbre/rhythm and variable texture are the focus. In each of these courses, students complete reading and listening activities, some of which have available links, although users must locate most readings independently.

Open University

Beginning music students will learn about topics such as clefs, rhythmic meter, pitch values and time signatures in the 8-hour An Introduction to Music Theory course. The advanced, 20-hour course, Voice-Leading Analysis of Music 1: The Foreground, is the 1st in a 3-part series. Music students learn about the Schenkerian analysis method, also known as voice-leading analysis, through examples of audio clips from Mozart piano sonatas.

University of California - Irvine

Students attempting this 9-part course will want to have basic math skills, and an understanding of basic musical terms and notations will be beneficial. Learners will investigate tonal systems and the math concepts used in scales and chords. Lessons are in video format and may be viewed full-screen.

Yale University

The 23 lectures in this course employ print, audio and video. Students will practice aural skills in an effort to understand Western music more efficiently, examine how composers put music together and listen to a variety of styles. The composers studied include Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Elton John and Bocelli.