The Music Box (Ritual in Transfigured Time education project) : Scratch for Ritual

Abstract

As part of the ‘Ritual in Transfigured Time’ tour 2016/17, Rob Godman was commissioned by Kate Romano (with funds from ACE, Britten-Peers Foundations, RVW Trust and Ambache Charitable Trust) to create a series of ‘digital music boxes’ using the Scratch coding environment (https://scratch.mit.edu) for an education project in Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire. We provided a series of templates, created in the Scratch programming language used in Key Stage 1-4, for children to create their own musical machines and other mechanical musical instruments. The templates were ‘hackable’ – allowing the children to adapt and make it your own. Using their own sounds, children were able to learn how the metronome (which was so important to Beethoven) works in relation to their own musical compositions. The education project consisted of visits and performances in schools by the Goldfield Ensemble with the ‘digital music box’ templates left with the children and staff to increase the legacy of the project.