Tag: graphic scores

Rhythm Circle Digital Games Project – Part 3

Digitizing Rhythm Circle – a long and twisty road from analogue to digital

‘I want big buttons and no clutter’ was the quick / panicked answer I gave to my long-suffering digital consultant who asked what I wanted in the digital versions of my RC games.

Before we began this project , I was already using digital ‘quick wins’ – simple ways of digitising my teaching resources e.g. downloadable pdfs, audio and video explainers. These digitised resources helped me reach out to my students in remote lessons, and circumvented the vagaries of dodgy internet connections. But I still delivered the lessons live and in-person albeit remotely.

The Digital Games project forced me to contemplate digitising my business processes. As a music educator, this meant digitising my teaching methods – an important consideration for this project because I, the teacher would not be with the students to guide them through the games or check their answers.

How would I introduce a musical concept? How would I provoke thought and experimentation? Make corrections?

A fun way to familiarise students with musical symbols .

In Musical Sudoku, the processes we wrestled with involved pedagogical choices: should players be allowed to put down wrong answers? Should the programme make auto-corrections to wrong answers or should the player analyse and correct their own mistakes?

The teacher in me valued the process of self-correction and so Wayne, our digital consultant designed the game programme to allow the player to fill in the game board with any symbols chosen from the menu. The programme would automatically highlight wrong answers – this made it easy to take note of where the wrong answers were. But the programme will not tell a player what the correct answer should be.

In Dynamic Dots the process is much simpler: the game programme was designed to prompt players step-by-step to create a simple graphic score.

Big or Small? A Dynamic Dots ‘game board’ prompting the player to choose a size to make a pattern .

Digitising working processes can be expensive: Trifort Solutions advised me on the best value-for-money digitisation I could achieve with a tiny pot of funds:

  • Automation was necessary to allow users to generate new and different game boards for Musical Sudoku – something thing which raised a cheer amongst my Sudoku-fiend students . LOTS and LOTS of new Musical Sudoku boards to be had at the press of a button!
  • Good digital design was always a priority so we spent lots of time in this area: to support users with visual processing disorders, the game ‘boards’ were designed with an emphasis on clean, clutter-free displays and large buttons (I did mean it!). Only small amounts of information are shown in an organised fashion.   High-contrast visuals are used and backgrounds are lightly tinted to remove the usual glare from stark white screens.

For other digitisation options, I used open-sourced software which was either free or very affordable:

  • Audacity to edit sound samples
  • Inkscape to create better pdfs using vector graphics which scaled beautifully without losing their sharpness (instead of enlarging picture files)
  • Animaker to edit and produce live capture / cartoon video explainers

We are now nearing the end of the project and my thought to share with anyone looking to digitise their work is this:

  • think about the whole user’s experience from beginning to end and beyond. Not just the person who is your average Jane, but also users who have different needs.
  • think about your working processes and define it: how and why do you do things? Digitising your working processes will most certainly help you work with more efficiency and clarity.

More importantly ….. just have a go! It could be anything from live capture of audio samples, creating your first pdf worksheet / video explainer, signing up for your first CRM (customer relationship management) system.

Whatever you choose to digitise and however you choose to do it , your first attempts at digitisation might not be perfect but it is so worthwhile to try. I thought I’d learn loads about digital working – and I have, but I also far more about Wai Sum Chong – the teacher, the musician and the person.

Graphic Scores

Accessible and inclusive music notation

What do you do when you have time on your hands and a glut of tomatoes? Make a tomato graphic score, of course!

Last summer during the 2020 Covid pandemic, my little veg patch produced an abundance of 3 different varieties of tomatoes, little Sungold cherry tomatoes, big fat Mallorcan ones, and some random ones which self-seeded from previous years’ crops.

I laid the semi-ripe tomatoes out in the sun to hasten ripening and amused myself making little impromptu graphic scores. Musical doodling using fruit.

  • Polyphony – multiple layers of sound, with a pattern of loud and quiet sounds.
  • Pitch – highs and lows
  • Crescendo and Diminuendo – sound gradually getting louder, then quieter

Graphic scores  are a way of ‘writing down’ sounds .

They are a very accessible, creative and intuitive way to record and share ideas about sound: a non-conventional form of music notation. Different musical meanings can be assigned to shapes, colours, and lines or simply left to the interpretation of the player.

You can use anything to create graphic scores. I have tried sand (real, kinetic, edible), cardboard, bottle caps, vegetables, sticks and stones, leaves, flowers, pasta shapes, shells, even scrunched up balls of paper.

Runner beans are very useful vegetables. Different lengths represent different durations of sound
Pumpkin pulse! 3 beats in a bar represented in pumpkin form.

Graphic scores are very useful to children with special needs because we can tailor a graphic score to meet the needs of that individual.  You can make ones which can be contained within reach for people with restricted mobility or spread out over a wide area to promote movement for those who crave kinaesthetic input. Those who find deep pressure calming may like graphic scores made out of playdough which they can knead and form into shapes.

A 3D graphic score made from building blocks. Each knob is 1 count and blank spaces represent musical silences.

It allows children who have limited mobility, are non-verbal / speech-delayed / pre-literate  to express and share their ideas about sound and music. Visually-impaired learners are able to feel textures in 3D graphic scores and ‘read’ musical ideas much like they do with Braille text.

Pitch sirening activity - if you're handy with a hot glue gun, these coloured glue squiggles are very satisfying to trace and vocalise.
Tactile coloured squiggles (made with a hot glue gun) are very satisfying to trace whilst using vocal pitch to match the rise and fall of the line.

Although they are primarily visual and/or tactile, enticing possibilities are there to develop associations  with scent or taste as part of a more multi-sensory experience. For example:

            a spiral shape + lemon scent = fast music (whirlwind)

            a blobby shape + cinnamon = slow, chilled-out music

I can just feel a baking session coming on… flavoured cookie dough for making edible graphic scores, anyone?