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.

This rant (I think, I’ve completely sidetracked myself now) came from that being the first word which got all up in my grill when trying to discuss the following two… atypical… ways of interacting with sounds.

This is Visible Sound from the design group (whatever that is) with the appropriately pretentious name SOUNDS.BUTTER. It sews sounds. Well, their waveform anyway.

And then we have….

Click here to view the embedded video.

Which uses a handheld scanner to play notes which seem to (loosely) correspond to squiggles scribbled on a piece of illuminated paper.

Any more of this kinda thing out there? If I find about seven of them I can do one of those link-whoring list posts.

When a white person encounters another white person who actually enjoys classical music (exceptionally rare), it is often considered to be one of the most traumatic experiences they can go through.

“Really?  Beethoven’s 5th Symphony….that’s your favorite.”
“um, no, I mean…”
“You sure it’s not Pachebel’s Canon?”
“well, ah, I like that, ah, song”
“sigh, of course you do.”

But like so much stuff on the internet, the real gems are in the post-article discussion. All 28 pages of it. Well, I’ve gotten to about page 4 so far, but I’m extrapolating. One of my favorite comments so far is this thought on music appreciation:

One sign that someone really does appreciate a certain genre of music is selective liking i.e. if that person also dislikes certain subgenres or artists within that genre. Especially if the disliked subgenre/artist is one of the more well-known or prominent ones.

I dunno. Perhaps that’s one of those observations which seems really profound until you think about it for five seconds. I still like it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why? (I hear you cry out in delightful unison) I shall tell you. I like the contrast. I like I how within the writhing chaos there are melodies that move in and out of phase with each other. The best example: the way the brass pours together around the 27s mark. I love that crystallization of order, particularly contrasted against all the disorder. It’s analogous (in a sort of pretentious way) to the process I go through when getting to grips with every new piece of music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This technique would be perfect for preparing the least exciting performance ever of the Ligeti Poème Symphonique. Although… it would be pretty neat having 100 of these little ticking beasties arguing over a plank of wood.

(Note: it isn’t this painful if you use one of the pretty graphical installers, but that takes all the fun out of it)

Well anyway, it turns out that I could have fixed my little umlaut problem in about five seconds, but I like my new system better anyway. We are all happy: me, Mahler, and my computer.

Yes Mahler. I tried listening to the 9th symphony today. The second movement rocks! There are weird wobbly bits of sarcasm and uncomfortable tonalities, all wrapped up in a snidely cheerful 3/4ish rhythm. I love all that. And since it’s Mahler it lasts about ten years. That bit is more difficult to love. It’s really freakin’ intimidating when a single piece lasts over an hour. *cough* Bruckner *cough*

Click here to view the embedded video.

This extremely well-produced and soon-to-be-multi-award-winning video features a melodic similarity between Vasks and Shosty that I noticed today. I’ve listened to the Vasks Cello Concerto a bunch now, and parts of it are starting to grind themselves into the understandingy parts of my head. One of those parts is in the video above. Today, humming it while wandering between lab-rooms, I found myself slipping into the middle snippet in the video, from Shostakovich’s cello concerto #1.

I like noticing stuff like that.

Vasks is getting good. The fast movements (like the one the video clip is from) are the best for me so far. By best, I mean that I am starting to remember the melodies and understand the flow of ideas a bit. The two outer movements are not working out as well, especially the last, but that’s sort of expected because they are slower and build-uppier, and those always take me longer to work out.

I like how he combines Romantic type tonality with all kinds of interesting bits of percussion and brief bizarre outbursts from the orchestra. And it doesn’t have that “deliberately wacky!!!111!” feel Schnittke almost always does. It fits together.

The sacred ritual of raising money with a nudey calendar has been part of human culture since at least prehistoric times. The latest kids to get into the sort-of-naked act are the guys and gals of the Royal Opera House. It’s only 10 quid from the ROH store and there are 12 months of guys and 12 of girls in every action-packed one of them. Buy a dozen and re-wallpaper your living room.