Character, Place & Simulation Week 2: Tinkering as a Method

Character, Place & Simulation Week 2's Class Activity

Emulating a Music Box

Working on my major project, I have the 'skeleton' of a story for my audio videogame; Child imaginings and staying with Grandma meet puzzel solving and exploration.

A core componante of the game will be needing to locate and piece together Grandma's music box's missing music.

It formed while I had been tinkering around and fixing a music box rocking horse, that I had been given as a little girl, by my Granddad. Which had then sparked my recall that my Grandma would show me her collection of music boxes when I'd come to visit her, when she had owned the farm.

Excellent! I had thought, but then how can you make a music box song?

I'm not a sound designer, nor am I a proficient musician. 

Lucky for me, I have a program called MuseScore (it's free), it enabled me to experiment with different instruments at different timings and scales. All while creating a music score that I could playback and hear via my laptop.

Despite the array of instruments at my fingertips, none seemed to match the sound I was after. The Music Box. It was then I discovered MuseScore's 'mixer' tool, and low and behold one of the selections availble was 'Music Box'.

I used a Grand Piano Scoresheet, changed the mixer from Grand Yamaha Piano to Music Box, exported to a MIDI file, opened it in Apple's Garage Band and shared with my iTunes library. Where it converted it to m4a file.

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Please see attached are screen shots of my tinkering and two music files of my tinkering, to which you can listen to.

'Music Box Piano' - The score as it stood when I was exploring different options on how to emulate a music box's sweet sound.

'Music Box Experiment' - The same score as 'Music Box Piano', after the discovery of the Mixer tool.

Downloads:

Download File: music-box-piano.m4a
Download File: music-box-experiment.m4a