Exploring Digital Sound
National Curriculum Links - Computing KS1
The content of this plan cover the following National Curriculum strands:
- use technology purposefully to create, organise, store, manipulate and retrieve digital content
- recognise common uses of information technology beyond school
Why this? What does it build on?
This is a really creative unit that begins to show students the many ways we can create and edit multimedia content on digital devices. The content focuses on music and sound, but also looks at how that can be paired with imagery. It should build on exploring sound and music with instruments in Early Years, but show them some interesting and unique ways to create music digitally.
What comes next?
Our scheme of work contains a wide range of units that cover different ways of creating and editing multimedia digital artifacts. Students revisit creating and editing sound to a much deeper level in our Key Stage 2 unit; Manipulating Sound. They will also be able to revisit and apply some of the skills learned in this unit, to our other Year 1 units; Making Multimedia Stories and An introduction to digital art.
In Year 2 they will explore text and images in Writing in different styles, animation in An introduction to animation, and then further multimedia units in KS2 with Digital Imagery: Patterns in nature, 3D Design, Building collaborative websites, Creating Instructional videos, and Manipulating images.
View our full curriculum map
Take a look at our full curriculum map to see how units across all year groups, from Year 1 to Year 6 link.
Unit Resources
Suggested Software
- Peg and Cat Music Maker
- ABCYa Melody maker
- Electronic Drum Kit
- 2explore (from Purple Mash or the 2Simple Collection)
- 2Beat (from Purple Mash or the 2Simple Collection)
- Isle of Tune
- 2Create a Story (from Purple Mash or the 2Simple Collection)
- Keezy app
Key vocabulary for this unit
Digital - Any signals or data that can be expressed by using the digits 0 and 1 (binary code).
Digital content – any media created, edited or viewed on a computer, such as text (including the hypertext of a web page), images, sound, video, or virtual environments, and combinations of these (i.e. multimedia).
Edit - To change, add or remove elements in a piece of work (usually to improve it).
Evaluation - Making judgements
Layer - In sound or video terminology, layering is the stacking of media elements in a project timeline to enable playback of multiple elements simultaneously.
Online - using a digital device to visit a website or app that makes use of the internet.
Save - To store a piece of work in a computer’s memory so that it can be recalled at a later time.
Timeline - a graphical representation of a period of time. Used in video and sound editing to order and arrange the separate elements of a project
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