BBC micro:bit Bird Activity GitHub

Submit your SoundEffects

When we added a speaker to the BBC micro:bit, we wanted to make sure that the sound feature was as playful and creative as possible. We didn’t just want the micro:bit to beep like your dishwasher; we wanted people to make their micro:bits squeak like a clanger, chirp like a bird, chatter like R2-D2 or emote like WALLᐧE.

To help do this, the team at Lancaster University built a synthesizer that would give a lot of creative control over the sounds the micro:bit made, and also work well in the frequency range that the micro:bit speaker performs well in (loudest around 2.5kHz, which is very well aligned with bird song!).

This Synthesizer was used to make the built-in micro:bit sounds, but until now, we’ve not exposed the finer grained APIs to users directly. That’s changing, and this exercise uses a preview of those new APIs.

Built-in Sound Effects

We are in the process of creating the default Sound Effects that will be included in the micro:bit MicroPython runtime to demonstrate the range of things people can make with these APIs, and we would love your help!

We’re taking submissions from the community for cool sound effects will blow students minds (or at least, expand them and bring a smile!).

If you have a Sound Effect you’d like to submit you can follow these steps:

  • Fork the https://github.com/microbit-carlos/microbit-bird-activity/ repository
  • Create a copy of the template.py python file in the sound-effect-examples folder, and give it a new name.
    • This is important so that we can give you credit for your contribution
    • The MicroPython source code is under the MIT license, so using this license for the contributions is the easiest option
  • Replace the “Your-name-goes-here” placeholder in the copyright line with your name
  • You can add as many Sound Effects as you like into the same file
  • Remember to play them at the bottom of the file
  • Submit the PR

We appreciate every single submission, but as he micro:bit has limited resources we can only include a few effects in the final, official image. But don’t worry, if we can’t include your effect into the MicroPython build, it will still be available in this repository and they will be showcased in future versions of this workshop.