Music Teaching 101

I finished designing the Scratch project which allows us to play freestyle on the piano.

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/342680940/

You can practice playing along at home. Sadly, since you can’t connect up our awesome piano, you will have to stick to using your computer’s keyboard. Here are the assigned keys:

In order to play audio when the keys on our piano are touched, we needed to code a game using Scratch which, when certain keys were pressed, would play assigned pitches.

We were able to find a pre-existing Scratch project which gave us a starting point for our coding:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/342680848/editor

Our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that we want to achieve is to change the graphics as well as the keys that need to be pressed to play the notes.

If we have time we want to create an interactive piano tutorial in which we have sprites come down from the top of the screen and reach the keys when they should be pressed.

If we STILL have time we would love to make it into a ‘guitar hero’ style game where they get a score depending on how accurately they play the song in the tutorial.

UPDATE: I had embedded the wrong video… The full recording is now available.

I’ve finally finished my composition! Yay!

I hope you enjoy!

Check out the full score here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11N5Hbf0JSuvkUyKiql5HCdhIUDDA5WVC

I wanted to have a ternary type structure to mimic my model piece however I wanted to also have a similar build so that there was a dramatically different texture to the first section even though there was inherently the same material.

To achieve this I brought in brass instruments (French horn, trumpets x2, trombone, tuba) to join the clarinet and the flute with the melody and countermelody. I gave the melody to the first trumpet and the trombone. The other brass instruments play the countermelody with the flute.

With the strings maintaining the sustained chords and the harp playing the arpeggiated chords, the texture easily fills out to a dramatic climax.

I originally had strings playing the sustained chords in this composition however I then decided to change them to voices (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone, Bass) to make it sound more like my model piece. This however was problematic since I didn’t think about the fact that singers actully have to breath…

To achieve the truly legato and sustained sound I was wanting, I had to change it back to strings.

To thicken the texture and give my comp some ‘foreground’ material I added in a melody which became a sort-of round in the flute and clarinet parts.

I say ‘sort-of’ because it is slightly varied at times.

The following tracks show some of my experimentation as well as some of the final Sibelius audio.

To change the feel of the middle section, I also changed the harp part. It’s still arpeggiated however it is no longer a continuously flow of notes and has a more interesting rhythm.

There is also a division between left and right hand, with the left hand playing more of a bass line and the right hand maintaining the arpeggios.

For the B part of my composition I wanted more of a rhythmic drive. I wanted the whole section to be focused on short rhythmic motifs rather than long legato phrases. I then added in a semi-legato melody to give it some direction after some great feedback from my teacher. The following tracks show my improvisation to create the material as well as some of the final audio on Sibelius.

Please ignore my awful singing…

To fill out the texture of my composition, I added a harp part which arpeggiated the chords that the strings were already playing. A similar harp part can be found in my model piece.

Thanks to the advice of my amazing teacher, I decided to add a countermelody to my composition. To do this, I practiced improvising over the top of the chords and melody . I decided that I wanted something that created contrary motion with the main melody and the first two bars happened to sound like the beginning of ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park’ by John Williams…