August 18, 2005

Music Animation Machine

"...The Music Animation Machine display is a score without any measures or clefs, in which information about the music's structure is conveyed with bars of color representing the notes. These bars scroll across the screen as the music plays. Their position on the screen tells you their pitch and their timing in relation to each other. Different colors denote different instruments or voices, thematic material, or tonality. And each note lights up at the exact moment it sounds, so you can't lose your place..."

These videos are a stunning contrast to what music visualization has come to mean in the dawn of Winamp and Windows media style psychedelic representations. Not that those aren't amazing, but there is something ultimatly more satisfying about actually being able to read the structure of music is the way shown here. It is the architecture of momentary sounds, and in this you can really see the brillance of their construction, much in the same way as the Coltrane skyscraper.


via Tom Dukitch's links

Pierre Bezier

said this...

"Which are the parts played by experience, theory and imagination in the creation of a system? There is no definite answer to such a query. The importance of experience and of theoretical knowledge is not always clearly perceived; imagination seems a gift, a godsend or the result of a beneficial heredity; but is imagination not, in fact, the result of the maturation of knowledge gained during education and professional practice? Is it not born from facts apparently forgotten, stored in a distant part of the memory, and suddenly remembered when circumstances call them back? Is imagination not based partly on the ability to connect notions which, at first sight, look quite unrelated, such as mechanics, electronics, optics, foundry and data processing? Is it not the ability to catch barely seen analogies – as Alice in Wonderland did, to go "through the mirror"?

Will psychologists someday be able to detect in man such a gift that will be applicable to science and technology? Is it related to the sense of humor that can detect unexpected relationships between facts that look quite unconnected? Shall we learn how to develop it? Will it forever remain a gift, devoted by pure chance to some people while for others carefulness prevails?"

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