Making a digital musical instrument – a creative act in itself – allows you to work together with pupils to explore instrument design as well as music-making. There are many ways to approach this. A lot of digital instruments take a recording of string playing, for example, and make it ‘playable’. The first step is to find a sound; there are many available sources online, but finding sounds that are pleasant, free to use and without copyright restrictions can be difficult.
Freesound offers a collection of copyright-free sound files and has been an invaluable place to find interesting and quality sounds. For example, a search for ‘cello’ brings up over 2000 sounds. Although some of these may stretch your definition of ‘cello’ or ‘strings’, there are some beautiful files to choose from, such as ‘C2.wav’ and ‘Cello-A3-other’ for a legato sound; there is also ‘c_s cello B3.aif’ for a pizzicato sound. These give us some of the ingredients with which to create an instrument.
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