Music and Video Games

  Blog:  Today we arrived at school and as usual we did our games of the morning, and today we both did the strands without any hints and also guessed our bandle with the first baseline! We started our guessing game, which today was Mario Kart 8 but unfortunately we had to pause on it because until the afternoon Mr. Lowery and Ms. Bowman had to go teach at the middle school today. Once Mr. Lowery and Ms. Bowman left we were given open time to work and create tracks for different locations in our game, which we did until lunch, and I believe most people used the time to catch up if they were behind game development. Then it was time for lunch! After lunch, we developed game levels using the game developing google doodle and rhythm plus based on the tracks that we have done for our game. We also worked to analyze victory songs! Then we had the last 20~ minutes to play other peoples levels, Maria’s was notoriously hard yet fun! m

 Daniel: This day started uniquely as we started the day off playing a difficult song on our boomwhackers called “Groose’s Theme” from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword attempting varius different challenges as we went such as having the volume muted and ending with attempting to stay with the beat without pressing play. After we settled into our “morning routine” we started playing wordle and connecting to wake up a bit, as well as the daily Bandle which is a game similar to wordle however only containing songs. After we were finished we played our daily guessing game where we get 12 different locations in a video game then Mr. Lowery plays a song from one of those locations and we have to guess which one it is from until we are left with no locations left. We then did a music analysis activity where we each chose a video game and analyzed the boss' music for tempo, rhythm, pitch, instrumentation, etc. For instance I chose “Ranroks theme” from Hogwarts Legacy. Then we spent the r...

  Today, we kicked off our morning with a fun activity we usually save for later: boomwhackers! We split into a treble group and a bass group and learned how to play the Kahoot theme together. Our rhythm and boomwhacker technique is improving! After that, we continued with our regular morning activities: the Wordle, Connections, Strands, the Bandle, and our guessing game. Today’s guessing game included music from Terraria! We are slowly advancing our skills of associating music with locations based off the Elements of Music, which means more correct guesses, AKA more points for everybody in the class competition!!! Then, we began our project that we are going to work on throughout the rest of the term. We had until an hour after lunch to work on this today. We get to design a video game! To help us begin, Ms. Bowman gave us an excellent presentation on what makes a video game good . This includes plot, characters, locations, and most importantly, music. Today’s goal was to write do...

  We started our day with our game year in system, guessing game where Mr. Lowery play the song and we guess the game, year, and system the song belonged to. Today was so difficult. Most people got zero points. We then did the Wordle, which was “rehab”. Then we did connections, which was quick and easy today. Next, we did strands. The theme today was “bring a plate”. Next, we did a Bandle, which was easy, it was “Dynamite”. Next, we went into our song guessing game, which is where we guess which song fits into which location inside of a game. The game today was “Yoshi‘s Island”. This one was really fun. I got 9/12 points. Next, we all got boom whackers and played the song “New Horizons” from the game “Animal Crossing” which is always really fun. After our break Mr. Lowery started to teach us about a new music topic: motif. Which is a little bit of music that comes back many times. We even watched an 8-Bit Music Theory video to further understand the concept of a motifs. Our next ta...

  Today on 3/18 we started the day with a guessing game.  The game objective was to guess the game the music was from, the year the song was used and guess what device it was played on.  The teacher played music where we guessed the items above.  A few students were good at this game.  After this we received two assignments.  The first assignment was to make background music and noise effects for the Pony Express game.   The noise effects were used when picking up letters in the game.  The sound I chose was BOOM using a dramatic effect. The background music we created using multiple instruments on soundtrap.  This was my favorite part.  The second assignment was an analysis sheet about picking a song and describing the topics of the music.  The topics were tempo, rhythm, dynamic, texture, instruments and pitch.   Tempo means beats per minute  Rhythm means speed of notes related to tempo Dynamic means loud versus quite...

  Today, we started off by doing our daily game where we had to listen to a song and guess what videogame it came from, what year it came out, and what system it was released on. After that we played a guessing game. Today it was Stardew Valley themed. We had to match songs that we heard to a specific place in the videogame that it was programmed too. At around 10:00 am we switched over to music theory and vocabulary. First we learned basic music theory (eighth notes = ap-ple, sixteenth notes = wa-ter-me-lon), then switched to learning vocab such as “Instrumentation” and “Dynamics”  so we could better describe and analyze songs. We then ate lunch and when we came back, we had to do our own analysis of the main theme song from a game of our choice. I chose the game Stray. Then, we talked about our analysis and it was really interesting to dive deeper into the songs. For the last hour of class we learned how to create music using the platform soundtrap in preparation for tomorro...