Welcome Superstar

Educator notes

Educator Intro

Transcript

Hi I'm Tommi from Mehackit and I'll be guiding you and your students through this lesson. The contents on this page are meant only for you, the educator, and they contain some essential information about this first lesson. Now it's time to start using Sonic Pi for real for the very first time in your classroom. It's going to be noisy and a lot of fun. This chapter explains the key things we are going to learn during this first lesson called Your First Beeps. You and your students learn how to create basic beeping sounds and melodies with Sonic Pi. You'll also scratch the surface of looping music with Sonic Pi. In the end there are two exercises that teach you about saving the code files with Sonic Pi and recording your music as audio files. Now before taking off to the classroom I recommend you to spend a while getting to know the contents of this first lesson. Have fun and see you later!

Length of the chapter: 30 - 90min

Adjust the length of the chapter according to the time you have at hand. There are more detailed lesson plans below

Learning Objectives

The student…

… is familiar with the interface of Sonic pi
… can write a simple program with musical output
… has a basic understanding of notes, rhythm and tempo
… understands that computers cannot complete a sequence of instructions if they contain an error
… can iterate code a number of times
… knows how to save a program with Sonic Pi
… knows how to record the output of a program with Sonic Pi

Slides and Lesson Plans

You can use the slides below to introduce the first chapter to the students. There are speaker notes in the slides that explain them. To see the speaker notes, click Options > Open Speaker Notes in the bottom panel of the slides. There are similar slides in the Educator Intro of every chapter.

See also the lesson plans below the slides!

Slides

Plan 1 - Structured Lesson

Time to complete	Activity
15 min	Start this module with the slides above.
5 min	Add your students to your virtual classroom. See that everyone has an access to the material. If you have students' email addresses, you can enroll them before the first lesson.
15 - 20 min	Students start the first chapter alone or in pairs and go through the topic Welcome Superstar. They can skip the first video as you already showed it in the slides. Ask students to raise their hand if they have any challenges!
5 min	A little discussion in the class: any challenges so far?
15 - 20 min	Students continue with the material and go through the topic Play a Melody.Ask students to raise their hand if they have challenges!
10 min	Reflection discussion: What haveyou learned until now? Introduction to exercise 1 - Show an example result - Give a time-limit: 10 minutes!
20 min	Students develop their melody and submit the code to the box. The faster students can also do Exercise 2. You can end the lesson (or start the next lesson) by going through a couple of melodies the students have made, if they are willing to show them!

Plan 2 - Freely flowing lesson

Time to complete	Activity
5 min	Add the students to your virtual classroom. See that everyone has an access to the material. If you have students' email addresses, you can enroll them before the first lesson.
10 - 15 min	Show the learning material with a projector. Set a goal for the first lesson: Complete the first chapter! Show Exercise 1 of the chapter to the students with the projector. Ask the students to start from the topic Welcome Superstar! and then continue forward to the first chapter. Ask students to raise their hand if they have a any questions.
60 min	Walk around in the classroom and help students with their challenges.
10 min	Summary and the end of the lesson. - What did you learn? - How did you like it? - What felt most difficult? - Does someone want to show their work?

Introduction

Transcript

Hi, it's me Tommi from mehackit! This is the first lesson of the Sonic Pi course and it starts your journey into making electronic music of your own by programming. That doesn't sound too bad right? It will be a lot of fun and by the end of this course you could be making tunes like this or this But say what? What is Sonic Pi? Well, Sonic Pi is a pretty new and increasingly popular software for making programmed music. The course guides you through the basics of Sonic PI and teaches you how to use those skills creatively to craft your own tunes. Once you start creating your own music, you can also release it to the whole world. Not to mention, you can be a superstar performer with Sonic Pi. There's a whole global music scene dedicated to playing live coded music in rave parties, galleries and concert halls. The parties are often called algoraves and there the audience will see the code on a screen. After a few solid weeks of practice, you could be the one on the stage playing the music and making people dance. If you're sitting and watching this in a school classroom using a school computer, it's definitely worth mentioning, that Sonic Pi is free and you can download it from sonic-pi.net and it runs on your home computer. So who are we to thank for all of this? Sam Aaron from the University of Cambridge computer laboratory is the awesome creator of Sonic Pi. Now, enough of talking it's time to get serious!

Fire up the software!

If you don’t have Sonic Pi installed:

Go to sonic-pi.net and download Sonic Pi for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux
Install!

Open Sonic Pi:

Windows 10: open the Start menu (bottom left corner) and select Sonic Pi from the list.
Mac OSX: open Finder, go to Applications and open Sonic Pi from there.
Linux or Raspberry Pi: go to the launch menu and select Sonic Pi.

The Interface of Sonic Pi

Transcript

Now that you have Sonic Pi installed and running, we can dive right in by looking at the Sonic Pi interface. This is the Sonic Pi interface. It has three main areas: the largest one is for writing your code and we call it the programming panel. Above that, you'll see a row of buttons which will cover soon. There is a log panel on the right that displays information about your program as it runs. When you click on the Help button at the top of the window, the help panel appears along the bottom displaying the help documentation. When you start Sonic Pi for the first time, the help panel should already be open. It contains an awesome tutorial section, information about all the commands in Sonic Pi as well as different sounds, samples and much more. There are plenty of ready-to-go examples that you can use and try. You can copy and paste them into the programming panel and press run to play the example. Here's how it works. So first, we paint the area then copy and paste it to the programming panel and press run. And you can stop it. Let's try another one Copy and paste and press run. Feel free to mess around with them and make them your own.

Do this

Play a few examples by copy and pasting them from the Help panel to the Programming panel and pressing “Run”. Pick for example, [Sorcered] Driving Pulse and [Wizard] Blimp Zones.

Educator notes

When the students have had time to play around with the examples, you can direct their attention to certain elements of the code with some questions. This is a useful way to hint that the experiment phase is about to end and it’s soon time to move on to the next topic.

Example questions for students:

Can you find some samples ie. pre-recorded sounds in the code?
Are there any drum samples in the example code you looked at, and how are they named?
Can you identify any parts of the code that seem to repeat over and over again?
Which command creates a pause?
Which command plays a note?
Which part of the code looks like a description of the example?

Play a Note

Transcript

All right! Now, let's try to make some noise and program Sonic Pi to play notes. Let's type play spacebar 60 in the programming panel and press run from the upper left corner. And voila, we hear a beep! Fun fact: the number 60 we used is actually the same as the key of middle C played with a piano. Now try play command for yourself and try it with different numbers too. Hint: it might not be useful to go very much over 120 in note numbers as those are too high for human ears. Well I guess now you will definitely try the bigger numbers. See you soon!

Do this

Type

play 60

in the editor and press “Run” from the upper left corner.

Educator notes

The video suggests that students should not use values much higher than 120 with the play command. So what happens if (and when!) they use higher values?

Sonic Pi will try to play these notes, but pretty soon after 127 they will be too high for us to hear. So it’s not an error: but it might be confusing since the students won’t hear anything if they write, for example, play 1000 into Sonic Pi.

What if students are having technical issues with Sonic Pi?

It’s a good idea to encourage the students to look for solutions on their own as soon as possible. They can check out the troubleshooting section, talk to other students in the classroom or look for answers on the internet. Developing debugging skills is an essential part of learning to code!

Oh Noes, a Mistake!

Transcript

You made your first beep, congratulations! I would like to point out one thing about the play command and the number following it. Play is the actual command and the number following it is called an argument in programming. The argument specifies the note to be played. Fun fact: in computer science the structure of a programming language is called syntax. It describes how the language is constructed. You've already tried play command with different values. What if we write for example play 61 or play 59 how does that change the sound? Both of them actually play a different note. 59 is lower in pitch than 60 and 61 is higher in pitch than 60. What we just did is actually the same as playing the neighboring keys of middle C with piano. Fun fact number two: in music terms the difference of two neighboring notes is called a semitone. Now let's try to write pley 60. Oh! What just happened?? Sonic Pi didn't understand the command pley and this is an example of an error in your code. No, no don't put on that scared face. This is nothing to be afraid of. It is actually a similar situation to the computer as it would be for you if somebody asked you to do something in a foreign language you don't understand. In later activities if you see this kind of pink error panel showing up below the editor, you will know that you have probably made a mistake that you need to fix in order to run your code. It could be for example that you have made a typo, forgot to add a space somewhere or enter a number for some command. The error panel tells you on which line the error happened, so it is easier for you to spot. Once you start writing longer programs this feature becomes really useful. Everyone makes mistakes every now and then and in coding it's very natural. Even professionals make mistakes and then they fix them. Sonic Pi is all about exploring, there are no mistakes, there only discoveries. Now next let's make some cool melodies but before that, try making an error with Sonic Pi and see what happens. See you soon!

Do this

Copy this piece of code to Sonic Pi and try to run it. Then answer the questions below!

play 50
sleep 0.5
play 60
slep 0.5
play 70
sleep 1

Look carefully at the pink error message. Which two things does Sonic Pi report in the beginning of the error message to help you locate the error?

command and value

buffer and line

command and language

What happens to the sound when there is an error?

Sonic Pi will play nothing

Sonic Pi will just ignore the error

Sonic Pi will stop playing at the error

Educator notes

Nice to know:

The numbers you used are MIDI note numbers. They are a useful and quick way to play notes without having knowledge of music theory. You can easily adjust the pitch by lowering their value (making your note lower) or increasing it (making your note higher). You can even perform arithmetic with the numbers! Sonic Pi is familiar with both MIDI note numbers (values between 0 and 127) and traditional musical notation (such as :C4, :E3 or :G5). You’ll learn more about using this notation later.