More Open-Source Music
Hooray! Free sheet music for all!
I only just came across this site, even though all the drama of it reappearing happened half a year ago. I didn’t notice it back then because my visits into sheetmusicland only occur rarely. In fact I only go in search of scores for one of about, errr, two reasons:
- I’ve decided to try and play the piano again.
- I am obsessing about a particular passage in a piece of music, and want to know the key, or time-signature, or which instrument is making that funny noise (like that weird buzzing in Shostakovich 4)
Well hang onto your three-cornered hats, because today it was for another reason. The reason of animation. I had this totally awesome idea for animating a piece of classical music in which you’d have an orchestra layout:
And then the different sections would light up when they were playing. I thought it’d be interesting to get a visual feel for how the melodies are getting passed around, like you do with a live performance. Of course, in order to do this you need a copy of the score (or an insanely good ear and lots of time).
Instead of doing it manually — that is, looking at the score and by hand turning that into frames of animation — I want to automate it, at least a little bit. In the most basic version you don’t even need to try and work out which exact notes are being played. All you need to do is draw a line (or rather, a rectangular box) vertically across the clef and see how many black pixels there are inside. When a note is being played it will be darker than average. If you do this for the whole score you should have a pretty good indication of when notes are being played by each instrument.
Of course, things like this are always way easier to describe then to actually accomplish, but I’m gonna give it a shot when I get a bit of free time that isn;t spent playing on teh internets.
Tags: animation, classical music, orchestra
