Music in e-learning

I no longer use music much. But when I did, I used it for the opening and closing screens, and for transitional screens (e.g., a title slide that indicates you are moving into a new topic, activity, or module), never for content screens.

Instead of using pre-made royalty free music, I preferred to create my own in a simple loop editing tool like Apple's Garage Band (Mac) or Acoustica's Mixcraft (Windows). These tools come with little snippets of melody or rhythm patterns already recorded and edited so that the end of each snippet perfectly aligns with its beginning, allowing you to "loop" (repeat) them for a long as you need. You then stack these little loops on top of eachother to construct theme music for your course: Maybe a solo guitar or or trumpet plays a simple melody, which is stacked over a bass loop and a drum loop. Presto: you've just composed a simple jingle.

What I like about this approach is that it allowed me to use elements of the main theme from the opening screen of the course during the transitional slides. For example, I might play the full theme on the opening and closing screens, but only play the drum + bass elements on the transitional slides, or maybe just one short guitar lick from the main theme. This allowed the transitional music to be really short and not bog down the pacing of the course, while still being strongly related to the main theme.

This approach is hard to implement if you only have a fully mixed main theme of the sort you'd get from a stock library.