Audio clip from the film Wedding Crashers.

If you like creating simple melodies and finding harmonies…

I’ve always enjoyed the simple music-making applications with available notes on a grid that the user can turn on and off. Often these applications use a pentatonic scale (i.e. just the black key notes) so that nothing the user does can sound dissonant. But I prefer the challenge of finding something that sounds good, tripping over awkward chords on the way.

As a kid, I learned insane amounts from just playing around with the software my parents gave me or happened to have installed on our machine. I developed La Pastorale with these experiences in mind, aiming to create a setting in which people can learn about music theory simply by exploration and trial-and-error.

Have fun!

Mechanics

Maybe you’d like to see some the of the functionality explained. Here is a script for the brown bar that moves across the grid, responsible for triggering the notes.

Since each row of notes is a different color, I can associate color with the notes that I want Scratch to play. The variable called ‘speed’ is a value that changes when you press allegro, andante, or presto. I needed to have the note length and wait time adjust with each speed so that the note would play only once per beat.

Lots of people have asked how I make the melody to switch from major to minor. It’s easier than it seems! There is an adjustment to just one note that makes that happen: the third note in the scale. In our case, it’s an E. To make the entire melody sound minor, the E shifts down to become an E flat. So because the value of E changes, I used a variable for this row of notes.

The value of the variable changes when the user clicks the ‘major’ and ‘minor’ button sprites. Here are some scripts attached to the ‘minor’ button. The one on the left tells the button to appear to be off as long as E has value of 64 (its major value). On the right, you can see that clicking the button sprite changes E to its minor value and makes the minor button appear to be on.

This all essentially switches in the scripts for the ‘major’ button sprite.

This is my first political cartoon. I began thinking about the issues surrounding the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and “Islamophobia” strikes me as one of them. I am bothered by the image of the Muslim culture to which the majority of Americans (including myself) often subscribe. We need to understand that violent extremists are not representative of the Muslim people any more than American serial killers are poster children for America (although both point to serious deficiencies in our respective cultures).

On a purely technical note, drawing in a cartoon style was hard! The extreme economy of line and anatomic liberties escorted me far outside my comfort zone. I tried to copy the style of Mike Smith, who draws for the Las Vegas Sun. Of all the editorial cartoons I looked at, I particularly fell in love with his line quality and the human appeal of his characters.

When it comes to political cartoons, the broad range of historical styles are interesting. I particularly noticed the changes in the way cartoonists tend to draw people. Is it just a tendency towards greater efficiency, or does the progression reflect something about the way we as a society see ourselves? Hm. Forgive me for not appropriately crediting these Google Image search results, but they quickly illustrate my point.