Sonic Pi

GameMaker includes some sounds and and music with the software. These are free for you to use, even if you decided to sell your game. In other words, they are open sourced for anyone to use for any reason. As you work to make your own games, you may find using these sounds only to be a bit stifling. Sure, you could download sounds, but they are not necessarily legal (especially if they are a copyrighted sound or song... like Inner Sandman by Metallica) plus you could get malware or a virus from the download if it's a nefarious site.

So what is a creator to do for good sounds that fit into the style of your game?You can make your own sounds. I realize that this is not a class on music or audio recording. It's a class about programming and game design. Sonic Pi, created to run on the ultra affordable Raspberry Pi mini computer, is a sound and music making application that is free to anyone. It isn't anything like actually playing music in music class though. You use code to create a song. This may sound confusing, but it's rather easy to use. 

Sonic Pi comes with some built in tutorials to get you started with the application. As a class we will spend some time together playing with the application and learning some very basic tools. This packet of is the guide for the software walk through. It's very basic when compared to the tutorials that come with Sonic Pi, but enough to get you started and experimenting. It's a very powerful. Below is a video of a funk track made with it. Sonic Pi's cheif creator, Sam Aaron has a Vimeo channel featuring all of his work too. Both show the power of Sonic Pi.