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About this website:

This website will help the teacher and student navigate through a class project on making music (composition) with programming (also known as coding) through a platform called Sonic Pi. Don’t worry if you’ve had no experience in either, as this unit is designed for complete beginners for both the student and teacher. However, you will need to become familiar with the materials presented here if you've had no experience with programming and/or music composition.

Sonic Pi is a platform created by Sam Aaron (research associate at Cambridge University) and is used specifically for writing music while learning to code. You can watch a great TEDxNewcastle presentation of Sam demonstrating Sonic Pi where he also explains his rationale behind building this platform. I've also made a shorter introduction to Sonic Pi which you can show to your students here.

This unit of work is project based, where students make music with Sonic Pi for a selection of short videos of about 1-2 minutes in length. Each student will engage in both a group and individual project. The videos have specific themes on current issues facing the world like climate change, plastic in the oceans, and the refugee crisis, where the aim is to create what the students think might be an appropriate musical background for their chosen film. These topics have been chosen so that they engender a rich discussion and engage musically with meaningful contexts, however, the teacher or student could use any video that they would like to. The videos can be found under the resource dropdown in the sidebar (or just click here).

This unit of work also gets students to engage in chance based/algorithmic composition with music listening examples from Mozart, John Cage, Steve Reich, and generative music by Brian Eno. There are two pedagogical reasons for this: (1) to pull students away from the imitation of established styles of music and towards building an intuitive sense of arranging sounds for an introduction to composition, and (2) to get students to engage with what computers can do effectively – executing algorithms.

This unit of work hopes to develop students' computational thinking in an interdisciplinary way with both music and programming. A framework by Brennan and Resnick (2012) has been embedded into the design of this unit of work from their experiences with Scratch at MIT.

Please read pedagogy and teaching notes sidebar link before commencing this project.

If you have any suggestions for any part of this unit of work, email me at petriechris@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to hear your thoughts (or typo corrections)!

PLEASE NOTE: 

→ This unit of work has been designed for six one hour and 40 minute lessons for students of roughly 12/13 years of age for the new Digital Technologies Curriculum introduced in New Zealand in 2018. However, the learning sequence, activities and materials presented in this unit of work are designed to be flexible to the learning needs and capabilities of teachers and students. This means if appropriate: activities, materials, listening examples (everything!) could be swapped or omitted.

→ This curriculum plan has been designed as part of a Master’s thesis in Education. A mixed method case study has been conducted on this unit of work. The final thesis and other associated publications will be posted on this website once they’ve been published.

→ Like to suggest something? Email: petriechris@gmail.com