Enhanced Dice App Lesson 3

Enhanced Dice App Lesson 3 of 5

Adding sound

This is the third lesson in our dice app project. The first lesson rearranged the code from a lesson where we built a basic dice app. The second lesson added basic animation. In this lesson, we add sound. The sound will simulate dice clicking against one another or onto a surface. We will use one of the sound effects available in the Scratch development environment.

Dice bump into each other and onto surfaces. When they do they make a clicking sound. We are going to add that clicking sound here. Select the “Die1” sprite. We are going to assign the sound to the sprites. The sound will be the property of each sprite. We will use the individual properties to have a distinctive sound for each sprite. Click the Sounds tab.

Go to the insert sound options and select choose sound. Scratch has a library of sounds for us to use.

There are many sounds to sample. I will be using an effect. Click the Effects button.

Find the Finger Snap effect and click on it.

The effect is represented as an image. This image is a sound wave. There are tools below the wave to modify the sound. Click the play button to listen to the effect. I want the snap to sound more like something tapping. Click the Faster button once. Click the play button to listen to the sound. The sound has a higher pitch. Note how the shape of the sound wave changed when we increased the pitch.

Rename the sound to Dice Click. Click the Code tab to return to our sprite.

Go to the Sound section. Find the “start sound…” code. Attach the code to the beginning of the code. The sound Dice Click should be selected for us.

We need to add a similar sound to the “Die2” sprite. Go to the “Die2” sprite and add the “start sound” code. Sounds are associated with each sprite only. The effect we chose here is not available for the “Die2” sprite. The Dice Click effect option does not appear when we insert the code.

Repeat the steps from above to create the effect for this sprite. Change the name to Dice 2 Click. Don’t change the pitch. Return to the code and select the effect. Click the Roll button to test the program. That sounds great!

We need to change something. The dice are spinning very fast and the sound doesn’t sound much like clicks. This is because the event is happening too fast. We need to slow things down.

Go to the “rollButton” sprite. Insert a wait code block. The code is found in the Control section. Place the code at the beginning of the loop. Click the Roll button. The animation and sound have slowed down too much. One second is a long time when we are referring to computer coding.

Reduce the wait time to half a second. Enter .5 into the wait parameter. Click the Roll button. This is faster but I think it should be faster.

Reduce the wait time. Half of half a second is .25 or a quarter of a second. Change the wait time and click the Roll button. That sounds better to me.

The wait time is measured in seconds. Typical code uses milliseconds. That is thousands of a second. A second has one-thousand milliseconds. We need to use fractional or decimal equivalents. This is why I halved the wait times.

The dice are spinning at the same rate. They are synced. Tossed dice are rarely synced. We need to add some delay to one of the dice to have them offset. Insert wait code before the second dice set code. Change the wait time to match the other wait time. Click the Roll button. Change the wait time of one to increase the offset. Adding wait time slows the animation.

The animation and sound for the app are done. I would like to make the animation look more interesting. That will be the topic of the next lesson.