I have a somewhat unusual background for a computer science teacher. I started my teacher education studying music--not computing--to be a band director or an elementary music teacher. When I started working in computing, it was because of my interest in the tools that were entangled with music and CS in equal measure. Sonic Pi, a tool for making music with code, was a huge part of my classroom. My students made many, many cool (and terrible) beats and songs while they learned how to code. It was loud and fun, just like the kind of learning that made me want to be a teacher.
There are a lot of great tools for making music with code now beyond Sonic Pi. They basically fall into three categories:
Folks get excited about all of these, but I do not personally care about #1 and #2. The third type of tool--the ones for actually making and performing music--are the tools I tend to gravitate toward in my classroom. The other tools are fine too, but if you’re envisioning students actually making their own music while they learn to code, tools that fit point #3 are really the only options you should consider.
So here’s Sonic Tau. If you’re familiar with Sonic Pi, you’ll be right at home. The tool runs in the browser, has tons of information and examples for how to use it, and is still under development. Sam Aaron, the person who made Sonic Pi and is making Sonic Tau, is a CS educator and a computing education expert, so you can be pretty confident that his projects will be engaging and rigorous for coding students. If you teach middle or high school coding, check it out!
If you’re curious about what sorts of things you can do with Sonic Pi, check out this video webinar about data sonification, where I demonstrate how to load data into Sonic Pi and use it to make data-driven music: