"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's module is titled "Combining Art with Music". In it, we will explore the ability of Snap to use sounds in projects. We will then learn how to synchronize these sounds with visual elements on the stage.
In 1940, Disney released Fantasia, an animated film consisting of eight segments set to pieces of classical music performed my the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski.
The film's style and narrative format proved to be revolutionary in a number of way:
Fantasia was the first major feature film to blend animation with classical music on such a scale. Walt Disney sought to create "visual music" where the animation wasn't just a backdrop but a core element expressing the emotional and narrative power of the music. Pieces like Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite" and Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" were used to tell imaginative, visual stories, turning music into visual art.
The film pushed animation boundaries by exploring different visual styles for each musical piece. For instance, "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" featured Mickey Mouse in a traditional narrative, while the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" used abstract, experimental animation, blending surrealism and abstraction.
Fantasia was one of the first films to elevate animated films into the realm of high art. At a time when animation was often viewed as children's entertainment, Fantasia was aimed at adult audiences as well, making the case that animation could express deep artistic and emotional ideas.
Fantasia inspired countless animators and filmmakers to think of animation as a serious art form. It also helped introduce classical music to a wider audience, using visual storytelling to make the music more accessible.
The assignment for this week is to create an animation with synchronized sound. You may use sprites from the sprite library, import sprites, or create your own in Snap. The animation can be representational or abstract. For sounds and music, we will learn how to record sounds in Snap! and write simple melodies or "motifs" using blocks in the Tunescope library.
Save your program to the cloud, share it so that others will be able to access it, and then post the link as a reply in this strand.
Please provide contextual information for your project. If there is anything in particular that inspired your project, please share that as well.
Here's my current project for week 5. ProjectUntil we go over image editing on Wednesday I used costumes in the snap library. I decided to be a freak and made blocks for the first 8 bars of "Entry of the Gladiators" or more commonly known the circus theme.
Hi! Here is my project for week 5. This is definitely a rough draft... I have some random sprites going on but hopefully by Monday, I will have a nighttime theme to match my "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" tune that I made.
I noticed there is an issue when I open my project and initialize TuneScope: my music won't play until about 15 seconds after it's been initialized, and when it starts, it plays all the notes at once (which make it sound loud and horrible so be prepared). However, after that, my tune will sound normal. I wonder how I can fix this?
I was also encountering that issue with Tunescope... Something that was a half solution for me was using a broadcast block after initializing and having the music only play after receiving that broadcast... It still has some issues but I found at the very least at that point pressing the green flag when presenting makes it slightly more smooth.
Here is my week 5 project combining art and music. I used both the rainbow image in the snap library and the normal sprite to fill the screen with the colors. I made the "Over the Rainbow" melody and accompaniment by doing individual notes based off of sheet music I found online. I am sure there is an easier way to do this, but could not get it to work with the lists... Here it is: Link!
Here is my Week 5 Project! A lot is still very experimental, but my main goal is to have my animations move synchronously with the music. However, I'm not sure if there's a way to call certain movements in accordance with the set tempo (is there also any way to make the time signature 6/8?) - if anyone has any insight on this, please let me know!
And inside a "For each item in list" block, you can set the note to element 1 of item, and the duration to element 2. This method seems rather janky though, so if anyone has a better way of handling notes and lists, please feel free to correct me!
I thought it would be cool to make a quick jingle bells melody with a santa sprite I had on my laptop for some reason. I just chopped up a sprite sheet and used them for the costumes. Snap! Build Your Own Blocks
This is my week 5 project: Snap! Build Your Own Blocks. I was playing with a bunch of the costumes on snap and found the clouds! The music is inspired by a classical piece I really like called reverie which reminded me of the sky. I'm currently trying to figure out what would be a good color for the background and am playing with the speed of the moving objects, but I like how the bird's wings are currently matching the pace of the notes!
I really like this! It's really cute and I think the music suits it! Just a small suggestion but I think hiding the costume for the sprite drawing the rain could make it look more realistic, but besides that this is really cool!
This is my project for week 5. I like the dinosaur and how the current scene looks, but I'm still deciding on what else I should add. I also want to add more to the music.
I struggled a lot with the animation, not so much the music; but, I think I like how it turned out. I also was unsure how to make a "play motif" block when my sound was determined by certain locations on the stage.
this is my project for week 5. I was inspired by the Pokemon theme song and am working on cutting sprites out, but it's kinda hard to find/annoying to edit.
This is my week 5 assignment. I recreated the opening melody for Not Like Us and made the lights in the background kind of shift to the beat. The disco ball sprite is still something I want to work on, for now it is just a placeholder.
It was much more fun than I imagined! I literally made the "bad guy" dance in front. I just wanted to add a beat in the middle, but I don't know how to do that.
