Today was the follow up workshop to the lecture last week, with a suitacse full of Game Boys and a Commodore 64 the students got to make sounds for themselves using some of my equipment.

After recording them we put the sounds on their memory sticks to take away to be used in their own music. It was good fun and you can hear some of the sounds that were made below, and it’s also nice that the further we get into exploring sounds the better questions start coming out and the more interest in how sounds are made from scratch, which is something we will explore soon.

Sad to say but this will be the last venture into electronically made sounds for a while, next week we will be looking at sounds that we might otherwise not even hear and how we can access them.

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Today was the second session for the Holywells High School “Computing Club” and was mainly spent talking about the game engine, how the graphics are loaded and become “sprites” and how we map properties on to those “objects” and how we can make them interact with each other. With the “good guy”, “bad guy” & “item” sprites loaded in to the computer from last week, we then set about assigning them different values. We also talked about how “invisible platforms” work to allow quick and easy level making with very complex backgrounds.

It was again good fun and they seemed to get a lot out of it. It’s also nice to hear them say they are going to try and do it at home as well so hopefully some side projects will pop up too.

Next week we are going to be play testing the game to see what works and work out what we can do to make it better and for the week after we start “Processing” ripping the graphics out of the game and making our own game engine code from scratch.

Todays lesson was more of a performance than anything, I brought in a whole host of machines, two Game Boys, two Game Boy Advances and a DS and ofcourse my wonderful touch screen Mac controlling everything and we rammed that into Korg Mini Kaos Pad and out to a PA.

After a history and how I got into it, I gave a short performance and then let the students have a go on my instruments.  It was good fun, but next week they will get to use my equipment the whole lesson to create sounds to include in their own music and I will be taking in extra machines like a BBC Micro and a Commodore 64 to play on as well. Listen to some of the sounds they made today below (Warning Loud)

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Enjoy!

I was very pleased to get this project off the ground, recently I have spoke out publicly about the decline of programmers numbers and the absurdity of removing computing from the curriculum, so I feel very fortunate to be able to make a change to this however small that is. Over the last couple of weeks I have put together a teaching plan to teach secondary school children the basics of computing and video game making.

Firstly using tools like Game Maker and then Processing, making a game in Game Maker and then recoding it in Processing so they can learn about game dynamics and computing. Today was their first lesson and they were very good, very polite and very talented. We have only designed the “Good Guys”, “Bad Guys” and “Items” but things are looking good for the next lesson in which we will look at the backgrounds and level design.

Unfortunately there isn’t a qualification at the end of the course, but hopefully they will be inspired to use computers more creatively, even if it’s only one of them that goes on to program, that’s one more.

I should have some pictures of the games soon, and I will keep you updated on their progress.

This was a follow up to the Circuit Bending Lecture @ Suffolk New College, this time it was the students turn, after last lesson they were sent off to look through charity shops and car boot sales.  Some came back with some baragins, some didn’t.

I brought in my enormous suitcase full of  components and crocodile clips. Some good sounds were made, as you can hear below. (Warning Pretty Loud)

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Enjoy!

The video pretty much says it all.

Yup, you can read the article here or here, but in addition to this I’d like to say that I will be making a new version of Music Tech Master Stroke for the event featuring several percussion pages to allow for groups of people to perform together.

The workshop will be based on Samba style music it will just be using a very very modern device to create the sound.  The software again will be made available for free to the general public after the workshop has taken place.

Many thanks to Ross Dalziel at SoundNetwork and those wonderful people at FACT for helping me get this project off the ground. Many thanks to the Chip Tune Marching Band for letting me talking part in their workshop, which helped convince me to take chip tune music to the streets.  Now I need to get back to writing the new version of the software. Cya.

Check out an in-depth interview with me, my upcoming projects and a very good look at chiptune music on the Nerdy Show here. The show was recorded at 2am UK time thats why I sound so sleepy, I had to wake up to do it as I am always in bed by 11:30pm.

I also went on to discuss the decline in programmers at the Suffolk e-learning forum in my talk “A Choice To Compute”.  I am amazed I made it through it especially as I am feeling very coughy and coldy at the moment. Enjoy! I’m off to bed I go with my cold.

Photo courtesy of Eddie Dougan @ UCS

I am very fortunate in that, amongst my research and music composing I get to teach music. Not music in the traditional sense, and certainly not things like music theory, but things like sound design, Circuit Bending, Graphical Scores and Found Sound.

Today was a circuit bending lecture, I sat at a small table with the students huddled around me and over the course of the three hours I disected two keyboards and discussed basic electronics. Below are some of the sounds I made with the two keyboards I demonstrated, they were amazed at the sheer range of sound that a £3 or $5 keyboard could make with a few simple additional components.

Next week is their turn, they have been sent off to find cheap keyboards and electronic musical toys from charity shops and car boot sales, for us all to take apart next week. So I will post some examples of the noise we make next week. The overall aim with the two groups over the course of the year is to give them 22 very different ways of looking at sound, and we are only on week three.

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Special thanks to Geek Dad Paul Govan and fellow game critic at Game People for bringing this to the attention of Wired. I was very pleased to see it pop up on my iPhone during a lesson teaching degree students how to program. You can read the full article in the USA here and the UK here. You can find out more about Processing here.