![]() Yet, as evidenced by their history and purpose, most cater to expert computer musicians rather than novice programmers or musicians. Today, music programming languages are widespread and predominantly free. ![]() Music programming has become an increasingly popular pursuit as calls to broaden and diversify the computer science field have led to attempts at integrating programming and computational thinking into other topics and curricula. The possibilities for creative music coding projects are virtually endless including generative music-makers, audio-visual instruments, sonifications, interactive soundtracks, music information retrieval algorithms, and live-coding performances. Music programming is the practice of writing code in a textual or visual environment to analyze audio input and/or produce sonic output. We briefly touch on the history of educational music coding languages, reference existing Scratch projects and forums, compare Scratch with other music programming tools, and introduce new block design ideas to promote lower floors, higher ceilings and wider walls for music creation in Scratch. Through an analysis of limitations in music and sound code block design, a discussion of bottom-up music programming, and a task breakdown of building a simple drum loop, we argue and illustrate that the music and sound blocks as currently implemented in Scratch may limit and frustrate meaningful music making for children, the core user base for Scratch. In this paper, we discuss the affordances and constraints of Scratch 2.0 as a tool for making, creating and coding music. Music and sound are such an important part of children’s lives, yet their ability to easily engage in creating music in coding environments is limited by the deep knowledge needed in music theory and computing to easily realize musical ideas. ![]() While a plethora of work has studied Scratch in the context of children creating games and coding interactive environments in general, very little has honed in on its creative sound or music-specific functionality. Perhaps the most widely used educational tool that enables music programming is Scratch, the constructionist visual programming environment developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Music programming is an increasingly popular activity for learning and creating at the intersection of computer science and music. ![]()
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