12th of January 2016
I have been always interested in music, but I’ve never had success with it. I’ve tried with a couple of instruments (guitar and piano), but my musical ear is noexistent, anyway, I don’t give up with music. Because of that, a time ago, I started to try with digital audio tools, like FL Studio, but again, it requires some musical notions which I lack.
Recently, by chance, I found SonicPi, a tool to compose music that we can include inside a group called creative coding along with other frameworks such as Processing. Creative coding it is a long-lived community which I believe they do one of the most beautiful things you can do with technology; to create experiences instead of functionality.
SonicPi is a live coding music synthesizer, really easy to learn, really easy to use. It is developed by Sam Aron and his team from the University of Cambridge with educational purposes, very similar to other tools like Scratch from the MIT.
The tool includes a fantastic tutorial, which will guide you through different steps, starting with beginner’s stuff with very basic melodies, to more complicated compositions which they do not take more than 200 lines of code.
No doubt this a very interesting tools to develop our artistic sense and have fun, but it is a specially interesting tool to teach music at school.
Here you got a video of a TED talk where Sam explains the project.
References:
- SonicPi: SonicPi.