Sonic Pi tutorial with Miss Philbin

Carrie Anne Philbin is the teacher we all wish we’d had. If you’ve been intrigued by the addition of Dr Sam Aaron’s Sonic Pi to the latest Raspbian update, Carrie Anne’s here to walk you through getting started.

Carrie Anne (who was this year’s London Digital Hero award winner for her work on the Geek Gurl Diaries YouTube series, which you should go and check out immediately if you’ve not seen it before) has also written a comprehensive set of teaching materials and an entire Key Stage 3 scheme of work, which you can find at the Sonic Pi site. We really recommend you have a play with Sonic Pi, which you’ll find under the Programming option on the main menu in Raspbian. It’s an amazingly intuitive way to introduce kids (and adults) to key computing concepts (loops, algorithms, sequencing, conditionals – you name it, you’ll be using them) without having to spell these concepts out: as far as the kid sitting in front of the Pi is concerned, she’s just building a synthesiser and using it to make music. She’ll find she’s learned about loops, algorithms other fundamentals of computing as a side-effect.

Here’s Sam, talking about Sonic Pi at this year’s Campus Party London.

In case you hadn’t guessed, we’re extraordinarily excited about Sonic Pi. If you haven’t tried it out yet, go and have a play: you never know. You might find you have hidden talents!

12 comments

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This is a fantastic video :) Get Lucky

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This is seriously cool =)

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I’ve been a professional musician for some time and have to say that IMHO this is the direction music is going to go in … Traditional instruments will always have a place but very soon we’ll be plucking and beating ‘instruments’ we haven’t dreamed of yet.

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Sam’s the man !

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Very very cool! I will be giving Sonic Pi a look!

Matt
The Raspberry Pi Guy

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Had a surprise to see my Bach Minuet in the video. Thanks for including it. I would encourage you to have a go with Sonic-Pi. It’s a cool program and you can do lots of nice things with it. I’ve also coded Beatles Songs, and had a go at some whacky noise. See my site for links which you can download.

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It’s official – you are now a song writer.
Congratulations !!!

Lennon, McCartney, Paul Simon and Brian Wilson have nothing over on you !!!

You’re in the big leagues now !!!

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Anyone tried Sonic Pi on a 256 MB Original Flavor Model B or Model A Pi? Getting the following error when trying to “play 60”. Raspbian is apt-get updated and apt-get upgraded to current versions, and I’ve reinstalled Sonic Pi following update/upgrade.

/opt/sonic-pi/app/scripts/vendor/osc-ruby/lib/osc-ruby/client.rb:10:in `send’: Connection

refused – send(2) (Errno::ECONNREFUSED)
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/scripts/vendor/osc-ruby/lib/osc-ruby/client.rb:10:in `send’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:180:in `block in osc’
from :10:in `synchronize’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:178:in `osc’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:149:in `clear_scsynth’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:132:in `reset_scsynth!’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:41:in `initialize’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:225:in `new’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:225:in `initialize’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:320:in `new’
from /opt/sonic-pi/app/gui/../../app/scripts/run-code.rb:320:in `’

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Hi Jim
I can confirm using Sonic-Pi on a Model A. I am running it on a freshly imaged Raspbian SD card but this is purely because of separate experiments that didn’t work. I believe I installed and ran it on the same Pi before it got included in the distro and taht may even have been on a NOOBS card running Raspbian.

Michael

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This problem will probably get fixed much quicker if someone reports it here:
https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/issues

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@Jim Manley
No, it’s seems that something wrong with your SD card, try to get & setup a new one.

Don’t forget, that flash memory has limits, more on this you can find on Wikipedia.

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Probably too late to try to get it shoehorned in this year, but this would be great as part of a computer science / coding themed ‘Royal Institution Christmas Lectures’…

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