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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:

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:

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

Click here to open the Python editor.
Type “import music”.

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.

Create the variable ‘merry_xmas’ as shown.
Type the first note after the square bracket: “D4:4”
Type the remaining notes using the Python notation rules.

Step 4 – Program button A to start the music

Add the code “while True: ………” as shown. Take care to indent each line exactly as shown. (Use the TAB key to indent 4 characters at a time.)

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

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

Taking it further

You can extend the control system to show a “Merry Christmas” message on the LEDs when the tune has played:

Add the line to your program:

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.

Away in a manger

Hark the herald angels sing

O come all ye faithful

Once in royal David’s city

Silent night