Welcome back to my blog, or if your new here, hi :). Today is day 6 of the student blogging challenge, and this time its all about music. (If you were wondering why there is no day 5, it’s because for that challenge we put cool widgets into our blogs. You can check them out if you look at the sides or at the footer of the page.) Anyways, for this challenge I need to pick 3 different tasks related to music and complete them. Therefore this blog will be split into 3 parts. 1: A short history of the trumpet. 2: How to make your own music. 3: A quick optional survey about music!
1)
Speaking of playing music, did you know I play the trumpet? I’ve played the trumpet for three years now, starting in grade 6 band. The reason I picked the trumpet over other instruments, was because I liked the idea of a relatively small instrument that can blast out an absurd amount of sound. The reason why it’s so loud, probably traces back all the way to around 1500BC. Back then trumpets were just a horn that you could blow through to make a loud sound. These early trumpets were commonly made out of silver and bronze, but animal horns have probably been in use even longer. The interesting part about the trumpet was that it’s initial purpose wasn’t actually for making music. Instead of music they were commonly used for religious or military purposes. Focusing on the military side, Trumpets played an important part in signalling and communicating a message over great distances and to a large amount of people. This is probably why they are so loud and obnoxious today.
The main reason why the trumpet didn’t originally become a musical instrument, was because it didn’t actually have any keys to change the note. The only way to create a different note was to physically change the position of your lips on the mouth piece. This also meant that you could not create many different notes which was not ideal for making music. It wasn’t till the 1800s when they suddenly thought of the idea to put actual keys that could change the note of the trumpet.
2)
Off of the topic of trumpets, did you know that there are many free music making games online. They can be cool little things that you can play around with when you’re bored. The one I played around with was the Chrome Music Lab. It’s got lots of fun little sound related games that go from spectrograms, to cute little oscillators, to the one that I played around with, the Song Maker. This game allows you to make a short looped song. Now I have absolutely no clue on how to make a good song. I pretty much just barfed out notes onto the page in a way that I thought sounded good. Even though the notes are placed pretty randomly, it still sounded a lot better then I expected it be.
If you want to check out the song I made, it’s right here👇.
3)
Finally, here’s an optional survey I made using Google Forms
_________________________________________________________________________
See you next time,
Nolan 🎶