Programming: music with Sonic Pi

Engaging, purposeful and fun, this topic has everything you need to captivate your pupils and get them addicted to coding. Through Sonic Pi, children can combine their knowledge of music and related terminology, with their formidable programming skills to create different sounds, beats and melodies which are put to the test with a live Battle of the Bands performance!

  1. Subjects >
  2. Computing >
  3. Upper Key Stage 2 >
  4. Programming 1: Music >
  5. Programming music – Option 1: Sonic Pi (laptop and desktop users)

Choose your lesson

Lesson 1: Tinkering with Sonic Pi

In this lesson, children are introduced to Sonic Pi and given the opportunity to explore its capabilities and learn about debugging

Lesson 2: Sonic soundtracks

In this lesson, pupils create a piece of music, using their programming skills, based upon a given theme, including the use of loops

Lesson 3: Musical storytelling

In this lesson, after observing how music can affect the mood of a film scene, pupils compose their own soundtrack to a story, considering the pitch, tempo, timbre and rhythm of their piece

Lesson 4: Live loops

In this lesson, the children build on from the work done in Lesson 3 and are introduced to live loops to create a repeating beat or rhythm

Lesson 5: Battle of the bands

In this lesson, the topic culminates in a Battle of the Bands, which sees pupils playing their music live and adapting their code as they perform

Assess your pupils

Assessment quiz and Knowledge catcher. These can be used at the start of the unit to access where pupils are in their learning as well as the end of the unit to assess progress. Go to assessment resources

Knowledge organiser

Knowledge Organiser: Computing – Y5 Sonic Pi

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