TogsTech

Part 6 – 01001100 01100101 01100001 01110010 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00100001

Welcome Back Everyone, I hope you all enjoyed the videos I’ve created over the last couple weeks and found the couple minutes of it entertaining. I’d like to mention I heard back from my lecturer, James Humberstone, with a short video of him and his son after watching the film about Aural Chess and with a video of them singing and playing around with a cello to try to get it to work! It’s quite a funny little video HOWEVER it’s time to get onto this weeks BLOG:

CODING

We spent some time this week learning how to CODE like a programmer. We had a guest lecturer Rowena Stewart come in and teach us how to use Sonic Pi to make music in a different way! This process was pretty complex and took a lot of time to understand, and a very tricky process of typing HOWEVER I managed to get the little recording down below done in about 10mins.

This recording is built up by inputting notes to ‘play’ and then typing in the notes, although you can also input frequencies or numerical values. You then need to have ‘sleep’ in between each input in order to stop all the sounds just playing simultaneously. By changing the numerical length of the sleep, it allows you to change the amount of time between each note, as you can see in the recording where I have a small quaver run.

I really enjoyed this kind of experimentation with music. It took quite a bit of time testing and making adjustments to make it work, eventually creating a simple, interesting little melody.

TOGSTEACH

Using this in a classroom? Good luck! I’d be surprised if a classroom situation could use this form of notation effectively. A class full of university students have about a 50/50 success rate … I couldn’t imagine the slow process some studentsd would go through to make a simple melody

HOWEVER I think if you have a bright, techie class, or a school heavily invested in coding this would be an AWESOME to resource to use. Having your students engaging in music through writing notes, or numbers is an excellent way to communicate cross curricular activities such as IT and mathematics into your music program.