Play a Virtual Mbira on Google Today

I don’t use Google as my search engine due to its lack of privacy protections, but I do enjoy their doodles. There is a particularly fun one today (May 21, 2020) dedicated to the Mbira, a traditional instrument from Zimbabwe. If you click on the arrow, you get an animation that explains a lot about the instrument. You can also “play” a few songs by hovering over the right key as notes descend.

I like the look of the graphics and the educational content. I recently finished Children of Blood and Bones by  by Nigerian-American novelist Tomi Adeyemi, a YA fantasy book based on African mythology that is being heralded as the next Hunger Games series. I really enjoyed it, and it put me in an African frame of mind, so I appreciate this Google Doodle (although the instrument is from a totally different African culture than the one in the book). Still, I appreciate learning more about international music. So thanks, Google.

You can check it out at: https://www.google.com/


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s