MusicBlocks Software

My 17 year old daughter is guest-posting on my blog today to tell you all about a great new tech product she has just learned about and used!  Check it out!

I recently had the opportunity to try out the MusicBlocks software from Sugar Labs and I really enjoyed it! I know how to play a few different instruments, and I have also taken a class in reading and writing music. Since I know how music works, it was very cool to be able to create my own music in a digital environment that was easy to navigate. I enjoyed being able to create my own music, and being able to transcribe music that was already written.

This is a start block that runs all of the action blocks.

The environment is quite similar to different environments that I have worked with before, such as MIT App Inventor or First Tech Challenge Blocks (in collaboration with Google). It is a simple drag and drop programming language, which is great for younger kids learning programming. This would be a great tool for teaching young kids (or even teenagers or adults) about how programming and music work together and relate to each other.

I really enjoy the different things that I can do with the program, I like that with the menu graphics you can easily tell what you are using. The guide that was included was super helpful. I liked that I could skip around it to get to what I wanted to learn about specifically. The guide covered most everything that I was wondering about, except I want to learn how to include the bass line in with the treble clef line that I have working on. I was a little bit frustrated by the fact that ctrl+c and ctrl+v didn’t work to copy and paste the blocks, that would have been helpful.

These are single notes with instructions on how the little mouse will move.

Using the MusicBlocks guide I learned how to make a program, I made one that plays the first bit of the MacGyver theme song with animated lines that change direction and length along with the song. I want to try to add some consistently to the lines and make them grow and shrink in height with the pitch of the notes that are being played. It would be very helpful for younger kids to be able to see this, and to understand the correlation between music and technology, and since this is a visual drag-and-drop programming language, it makes it easier than a line-by-line program would for them to understand what is happening with the program.

Here is what my final project sounds like. Here is a link to my project so you can see what it looks like. https://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/index.html?file=MusicBlocks_MacgyverThemeSongBeginning.tb&run=True

I teach robotics programming to many kids in my community, I would love to teach a session to them using this program. I am going to tell my music teacher about this program, I think it could be useful to her, especially since her husband is in the programming field. I think that she could use this to show a visual representation of what is happening in the song with the notes. I feel that it is easy enough for anyone to learn, though it can get very complex, which I really like. I like it when a program can be used for simple projects, but then you can go deeper and deeper to get whatever kind of result you want. This software has that capability.

This is an example of a chord.

This program is very useful, but also super fun to use. This is the program that I created, the first part of the MacGyver Theme song. This is what part of it looks like, this is an action block that holds a few notes. I have indicated the note, the length of the note, and if there are any special things about the note, whether it ties to another note or is a dotted note, things like that. You can line action blocks up in a sequence to essentially “call” that block to play. I really like the fact that you could include chords.

Here is what the output of my music looks like. I increased the length of the line with each note or changed how much it turns, and this is what it looks like once the song is completed.

This is the design that I ended up with. It moved with the music.

I really enjoyed this program and I want to experiment with it quite a bit more. I really had a fun time working on this project and want to write my own music using this program.