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That’s enough explanation. Let’s get started on our tune “We wish you a Merry Christmas”

Step 1 – Prepare the tune

To prepare for making your program, the first step is to write underneath the stave the letter name for each note.

You now have a choice of coding editor:

Mr Bit JavaScript Blocks MicroPython

Step 2 – Prepare the code editor

Click here to open JavaScript Blocks.

Step 3 – Select the code blocks

Select ‘On button A pressed’ from the Input menu.
Select ‘play tone …’ from the Music menu.
Change the tone to read ‘Middle D’.
Add further ‘play tone …’ blocks. You will need 30 blocks for the first half of the tune.

Step 4 – Adjust the tones and the beats

Change the tone names, copying the sequence of letters from the music. ‘C5’ is ‘High C’ and ‘D5’ is ‘High D’. All the other tones are ‘Middle …’.
Adjust the number of beats to 1 or ½ as shown in the table.

Step 5 – Download the program to the micro:bit

Type a name for the HEX file and tap ‘Download’.
Transfer the file to your micro:bit in the usual way.

Step 6 – Prepare the micro:bit

You need to connect an earpiece or headphones to pins GND and P0. You can use crocodile clip leads as shown here.
Press button A to hear the tune.

Taking it further

You can extend the program to show a “Merry Christmas” message on the LEDs while the tune is playing:

Select ‘forever’ from the Basic menu.
Select ‘if … then …’ from the Logic menu.
Select ‘show string’ from the Basic menu.
Type “Merry Christmas”

Christmas Music Project from Mr Bit

Make your micro:bit play a Christmas tune.

Mr Bit shows you how to take a tune from a music score and enter the notes into a program for the BBC micro:bit.

Whether loud or soft, fast or slow, sad or happy, a tune always has a series of notes, one after another. A note can be high or low in pitch or short or long in duration. To make music with your micro:bit all you have to do is to put notes in the right order and specify the pitch and duration of each note.

What you need:

BBC micro:bit
Battery connector
2 crocodile clip leads
Earpiece or headphones
Insight Mr Bit software or a micro:bit code editor

The notes on a music score show all that you need to know about pitch and duration.

Pitch is shown by the height of the note on the 5-line stave; with 5 lines and 4 spaces the stave can indicate 9 different notes. By adding floating notes above and below the stave you can increase this number. Each pitch has a letter as shown here.

Duration is shown by the style of the note and its stalk.

The most common note is the crotchet, a solid blob with a plain stalk. When a tune has a regular beat, this is the note that shows the beat. Most tunes have between 60 and 120 beats per minute making the duration of a crotchet typically between 1000 milliseconds and 500 milliseconds.

In our Christmas tune, as well as having crotchets, we have two other types of notes:

Quaver: this has half the duration of a crotchet, so 2 quavers last as long as one crotchet.

Minim: this has twice the duration of a crotchet, so 2 crotchets last as long as one minim.

The quaver looks like a crotchet with a tail.

The minim looks like a crotchet with a hole in the blob.

Skip this bit if you are familiar with music notation.

Scientific notation of pitch

Since the letters for notes are used in a repeating cycle, at several different pitches, we need an additional code to give a unique indication of pitch. Scientific notation does this by adding a number to indicate in which octave (sequence of 8 notes) the note occurs. C4 is middle C on a piano; C5 is an octave above; C3 is an octave below. The octave number increases by one every time you go from B to C. Insight Mr Bit uses this notation for pitch.

Pitches of notes you can program with Mr Bit: