Classical Convert

Which day is it again?

Body clock confused. The zeitgebers are, have been, and will be all over the place. This is due to little dalliances off to the city in the middle of the week, and returns on the weekend, instead of the other way around. Oh yeah, and weddings. One wedding. A wedding located temporally twenty minutes away from the time at which I slipped up the driveway. Automotive lessons learned today: 1) I380-by-Scranton is full of cars and single lanes, especially on Saturdays 2) It’s really easy to get lost looking for petrol in Rockaway (but the scenery is nice) Happily, spatially, the wedding was only a ten minute drive away.

While on this edition of semi-vacation me and G dipped our (my, minimally) virgin feet into the application of soundtracks. For her architectural adventures, G created a stunning little video showcasing her building, and it needed musical accompaniment. It’s quite fascinating setting mechanical stuff to music. You automatically read intent into the motions of the building, when it fits the pulse.

Motion and music are intricately bound together. A musical crescendo is such a natural sibling to a physical crescendo: a rising mass of pillars, for example. Thinking about this makes me immensely intrigued in how people have illustrated music. Not so much the automatic visualizations, but more the Fantasia style interpretations. Has anyone famously built a short film around a symphony, for example? I feel like that has to have been done about 5,823 times already, but don’t know of any iterations of it. Perhaps my more-cultured-than-I (i.e., all of you) readers can tip me off.

Tags: classical music, interpretation, visualization

Spiral Tonality

Evening all.

One nice feature of having a decent collection of blog posts up and active is that every now and then someone leaves you a nice comment on a piece you had pretty much forgotten about. Today this was a comment from chaika, who commented on this post back from the depths of last year in which I really, really wanted a piece of software which would automatically display the tonality of a piece of music as it progresses.

Miss/Mister commenter provided me an excellent lead on the subject: Elaine Chew at USC has published a bunch of papers which attempt to do exactly that. Not only are her papers relevant, but via her references I can now work out all the other important writings on the subject. Awesome.

So far it seems that her method for determining tonality is based on a spiral:

In which each point on the spiral is a major fifth higher than the last (and so each point vertically above ends up being a third higher, which is why those chords look like triangles, because it’s a point connected to a spiral-neighbor and a vertical-neighbor) That spiral looks kinda complicated, I know, and I’m feeling the pain a bit because I only know the most basic music theory. However, I’m fairly determined to get to grips with the ideas in this paper, and it’s actually a rather interesting (and effective) way to learn the theory for me: backward from the math.

Tags: music, tonality, visualization

Hot Tuesday Linkage

Janacek would be proud. No, wait a sec, Janácek (check out the text decoration on that bad-boy… except the c doesn’t work properly. Darn.) would be proud. Someone (namely a dude called Ranjit) has a proposal for an installation piece which you can see in the following video:

installation proposal for artbots 2008 from ranjit on Vimeo.

It’s a robot which translates vocal patterns into musical sounds which it performs on a modified electric guitar and various pieces of percussion equipment. In the video linked above you can see how it interprets a brief scene from Citizen Kane. This is exactly the kind of thing that Janacek was into, apparently; trying to mimic the cadences of the human voice using instruments. Except without the electric guitar and microchips. Probably.

Additionally, reader Yvonne forwarded me a recent story about an attempt to geometrically visualize the structure of musical works. As regular readers are probably sick to death of hearing, I’m totally in love with the concept of theoretically-well-grounded visualization techniques. It’s a fairly holy grail. This press piece is tantalizingly light on exact details, but one of the most interesting tidbits for me was:

To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries.

Which I’m a tad suspicious of due to the “certain extent”, and might just mean that they got some pretty pictures which sort of look similar, but could be really neat. If I feel brave enough I’ll try and dig up the actual paper sometime this week and wade through acres of musical and mathematical theory which I do not understand. I can pretend to though. I’m getting really good at that after four years in grad school.

Tags: classical music, janacek, visualization