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Hi KQED,

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my name is Stephen Malnowski.

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Let me tell you what I've been making.

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

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I could follow the score for a single instrument

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[violin playing]

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much more easily than a score with many instruments.

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[orchestra playing]

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To make complex scores that were easier to read,

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

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like in piano music.

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

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I tried coloring the notes by instrument.

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

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

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The solution was to use bar graph notation.

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At first, I drew paper scrolls by hand,

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

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

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[electronic song plays]

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

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[harpsichord arrangement]

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

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[classical piano playing]

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[Beethoven's 5th Symphony]

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[adagio piece]

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[allegro violin]

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[Bach's Cello Suite #1]

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

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

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We tried this out with the symphony orchestra.

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It worked.