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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:
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-
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:
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 Python editor
Step 3 – Type the tune notation
For each note in the tune, we need to show its pitch and duration.
Like this: D4:4
Pitch is shown by the letter and octave number. (D4)
Duration is shown by the number after the colon:
A crotchet (one beat) lasts for 4 units.
A quaver (half beat) lasts for 2 units.
A minim (2 beats) lasts for 8 units.
The tune notation will be stored in a variable named ‘merry_xmas’. Between the square brackets each note is shown in inverted commas and the notes are separated by commas.
Step 4 – Program button A to start the music
Step 5 – Download the program to the micro:bit
Step 6 – Prepare the micro:bit
Taking it further
You can extend the control system to show a “Merry Christmas” message on the LEDs when the tune has played:
display.scroll(“MERRY CHRISTMAS”)
Python rule for pitch:
The next note will have the same octave number, unless a different octave number is shown.
Python rule for duration:
The next note will have the same duration, unless the note value changes: crotchet (4), quaver (2), minim (8).
Christmas carols
Download these scores to create more Christmas tunes.
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