“Creating Art & Music” is an introductory course designed to introduce creative activities in the context of art and music. Thus far the course has been taught at the middle school, high school, community college, and university level (with appropriate adaptations for each level). Each week this fall, students in the course are posting their projects in this strand of the Snap! forum. Here’s a link to the course materials:
This week extends the work done in Module 5, in which participants created animations on the Snap*!* stage and synchronized them with music written in TuneScope.
In this module, we will build on that work by incorporating a MIDI controller connected via TuneScope blocks, to trigger sounds, actions, and events on the Snap*!* stage. This can be done by using the Current Note block to track changes in MIDI input and assigning triggers to different notes.
animation with sound by elnoramagruder | Snap! Build Your Own Blocks Here is my project! When someone plays a note on the keyboard, the bat flaps its wings and moves once. I just adapted my original bat project so instead of it moving automatically, it moves within the if statement! I have no idea how to play piano so I was making some funny-sounding tunes while making this!
I updated my module 5 project using the sprite to go to random places both on beat with the motif being played and also if any additional MIDI keys are played using the controller. I wanted to try and see how the MIDI would interact with notes being played manually at the same time via TuneScope and it comes out to be an interesting result where the sprite moves along with the music.
My project this week is a refactoring of my audio visualizer project where instead of responding to a pre-programmed melody the shape in the program instead responds to notes on the MIDI. A change I hope to make in the future with my program is to allow for repeat presses of a note on the MIDI to also cause a response with my program but with what I could find in the implementations of “Current Note” and the different grey reporter blocks I could not find a clean way to do this.
I updated my module 5 project to have the keys determine the speed of the pitch. It was pretty simple to figure out, however it proved more difficult to adjust the speed of the bat swing as well, perhaps because of the complications I had originally when I was trying to time those up. I’d like to be able to build off of this to then have another key press initiate the swing of the bat, but I’m not entirely sure how to go about it without complicating the throwing of the ball.
I went back to and reused my walking dog animation from earlier this semester, but for this new variation, I may or may not have abandoned the musicality ambitions of the earlier iteration. Functionally, you have to “step” like the dog steps, playing the next note following the one listed in the top left. While this isn’t very musical, I find it interesting how the physical progression of the user’s playing of the MIDI mirrors itself in the project.
I wasn’t in class so I am not sure if I used the MIDI controller blocks correctly, but I looked at the examples and adapted my week 5 project so that when notes are played the dots stamp randomly across the screen.
For this week’s project I built off my Jaw’s Music Visualizer by making the gliding of the shark responsive to a note playing on the MIDI controller. The shark will glide to a corner and will only begin gliding to the next once a different key is played. Additionally, the shark thinks which note was played above it. In the future I hope to add a splash animation triggered by the MIDI. Overall, I am happy with the final result. My Project: Jaws MIDI
This is a variation of my project from week 5. When you play a new note the character changes position and if you play notes fast enough, it looks like the character is dancing
Snap! Build Your Own Blocks Here’s my project for this week I adjusted my previous assignment so that on every input key press Alonzo dances back and forth and switches colors. One thing I did have to change was adding the line so that when he hits the end of the screen, he bounces off of the wall since before I had a set number of notes then he would turn around.
Hi Kevin! I really like your project. I love how realistic and video game - like you made the sprite, and its so cool that playing the keys fast makes the character dance!
Using the external canvas and variety of different costumes for the character made this seem pretty different and unique every time, and pretty interesting to play around with.
The effect looks really cool, when the circle gets big when you play a new note! It might be even cool too, if the color changed when a new key is pressed, instead of being random.
For my project this week, initially I wanted to create an original song to go with the flashing lights of my Module 5 project, but that seemed a little too ambitious, as it was very hard to work with different notes coming from a prerecorded song. So instead, I created a MIDI interaction controller with randomly placed starts, simulating a very simplistic space.
Love this idea! Super fun and active use of the midi keyboard. I’m not sure if it’s anything on my end, but Alonzo wouldn’t dance for my midi. There was an initial rotation of 15 degrees, but it never moved after that.
I was able to get my shark fin to turn directions on every press of a key (assuming it’s different than the last played note). This is a major improvement from my initial project as it lacked this responsive capability. I am now satisfied with the final product. Revised Project: RevisedJaws
I really like how this project works! The feature where you must click every ascending key in order to get the dog to walk is super unique and interesting. While this does restrict you to only playing a specific tune, I think it works very well for your project. I think it would be cool if the dog could also walk in reverse if you click a descending key. Overall, great job!
I used the midi keyboard to extend my other project. It is playing the motif of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and I added the animation of when its playing the notes to spring in size. I set the midi controller to play the notes from the motif.
I adjusted my previous assignment so that on every input key press Alonzo dances back and forth and switches colors. One thing I did have to change was adding the line so that when he hits the end of the screen, he bounces off of the wall since before I had a set number of notes then he would turn around.