Violin Rolls, Anyone?
Not the delicious bready type, the piano type. Today Toyota unveiled two robots to look after their elderly. One is a boring mobility robot, but the other is 21876 times more interesting because it can play the violin. Apparently Japanese pensioners are not getting their RDI of serenades.
Watch it playing Elgar here.
I wonder why it… I mean, they, chose such a traditionally English piece?
Realtime Liner Notes: Visualizing Music
Or should that be Living Liner Notes? (thanks Miss M!)
When YouTubing this post about Bach on the accordion, this visualization video popped up in the “related stuff” sidebar:
Which is very nicely related to all of the understanding music via automated liner notes I have been incessantly harping on about recently. Some thoughts on this particular instance of visualization are:
- A surprising number of patterns jump out at you when you can clearly see the basic relationships between notes being played – but in an intuitive, not mentally analytical fashion.
- It takes a lot of work to produce something that both sounds decent and is visually clear.
- People are fascinated by this – there are almost 600,000 views of this video.
Now what would be really great is something which can suck in an MP3 and spit out something like this. That’s a fairly lofty goal, but I’m going to play around a bit with visualization methods and see if I can anything remotely convincing to work. I’ll try and document my progress on here, starting with the most basic, trivial visualizations.
But perhaps I’ll wait until after my Friday biochemistry final to get started…
Much Money for Mozart’s Musical Musings
The BBC are reporting that a single page of Mozart’s draft for the Sinfonia Concertante has been sold at auction for around £110,900 (around $228,000 – the exchange rates are that awful. My student loans are exploding) While that’s an incredibly huge sum of money for a very old piece of manuscript, I can definitely understand the desire, if not so much the price. That’s minimal supply and maximal demand for you. I wonder how much less famous composer’s stuff goes for? If you could predict which ones will get rediscovered and fashionable in the near future, you could maybe make a killing.
Realtime liner notes: More thoughts
A couple of days ago Matthew Hodge added a comment to this post about my automated liner note fantasies which I think elucidates several important points, so I’m gonna give it a post all to itself right here:
At the risk of offending ACD (and I know there are many people who hold strong opinions about all this), I think the Concert Companion still is a fantastic concept and (if done properly), I believe would totally open the world of classical music to new people.
I know this because a couple of years ago (long before I knew about the Companion or anything like that), I tried an experiment where I invited round to my home half a dozen friends who knew nothing about classical music but were willing to have a listen.
I handed out sheets that explained the music and broke it down in sonata form, themes, etc. with descriptions matched to particular times on the CDs we were going to listen to. I wasn’t sure what to expect the first time, but to my amazement, I watched as this bunch of novices not only grasped the form of the music, but were absolutely riveted listening to an entire overture, Mozart violin concerto and Beethoven symphony. Half an hour long pieces, and they followed the whole thing!
Let me tell you, it is the most exhilarating thing in the world to see someone’s eyes open to music.
I think the biggest problem that we face in reproducing this in the concert hall is not the technology but:
a) Existing audiences (who’ve been fortunate enough to learn music, etc.) get very particular about what goes on in concerts and usually aren’t keen for new things. (e.g. “What’s those flashing lights on in the concert hall? Highly distracting.”) Granted, these people would have killed off surtitles as well, and in my opinion, they’re the greatest thing to happen in opera for years.
b) You can only explain so much music while it’s on the go. Really, you need about half an hour beforehand to explain to people the big picture of musical structure (sonata form, movements, etc.). Ideally, this would be perfect for a pre-concert talk. But how many good pre-concert speakers are there nowadays? Not many.
c) Far more serious, there is a severe shortage of writers who can explain music to the layperson in an interesting way, so even if you had a running commentary, would it make the music exciting or just boring. (For examples of how to make music exciting, I suggest reading George Groves’ “Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies” or David Hurwitz’ “The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner’s Manual”.) If those guys (well, George has been dead for 100 years) wrote for the Concert Companion, it would probably still be running today.
I think he’s bang on. Discovering the previously (to me) hidden structures of classical pieces completely knocked my uninitiated little socks off when I first discovered it, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other people would feel the same way. However, it’s also clear that there are a bunch of problems doing it in the concert hall: experienced people are likely going to get pissed off by the blinking whatevers, and for inexperienced people it’s probably going to go by too fast. I think the answer is the internet. Something like keeping score, but with many more pieces and more options. I think if one of the online classical music suppliers put something like this together, executed well, it could be very profitable for them. Do you hear me DG? Naxos?