Making the Music Animation Machine

Hi KQED,

my name is Stephen Malnowski.

Let me tell you what I've been making.

A while ago, when I was learning to read music,

I could follow the score for a single instrument

[violin playing]

much more easily than a score with many instruments.

[orchestra playing]

To make complex scores that were easier to read,

I condensed them by putting all the notes on a single staff,

like in piano music.

Unfortunately, this made it hard to see which instrument was playing which note.

I tried coloring the notes by instrument.

That worked better, but since all the note symbols were about the same size,

a long note for one instrument could easily be lost among shorter notes of other instruments.

The solution was to use bar graph notation.

At first, I drew paper scrolls by hand,

but later I learned how to make them with computer software.

The first version, on the Atari 800, looked and sounded like this:

[electronic song plays]

The second one, on an IBM PC, looked like this:

[harpsichord arrangement]

Over the years, I experimented with other ways of showing music.

[classical piano playing]

[Beethoven's 5th Symphony]

[adagio piece]

[allegro violin]

[Bach's Cello Suite #1]

Recently a violinist told me he wanted to use my visualizations in live performance.

So I made a version of my software in which the timing of the animation is controlled with a crank.

We tried this out with the symphony orchestra.

It worked.