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.