Sheenu-Looking Outwards-11

This is a segment from Animusic, a series of musical and computational 3D animations. This particular one is named “Pipe Dream” and features numerous balls shooting out of pipes and hitting guitar strings, bells, xylophones, drums, and cymbals. Each segment in the series follows a certain artistic theme, a certain genre of music, and a certain type of orchestra. Electronic music would have a sci-fi theme and its orchestra would mainly consist of synthesizers and electronic drums. Classical music would have an orchestra consisting of violins, brass, and woodwinds.

As a child, I was always fascinated by the variety, creativity, and autonomy that is displayed in the Animusic series. At the time, the idea of robots playing music was a fascinating subject to me and it still is today. However, what I didn’t realize was that the animation itself was already, in a way, a robot playing music.

The Animusic animations are not animated by hand, but rather are animated and controlled by the computer through listening to the music. The software used to make the whole animation come to life is a custom made engine named “MIDImotion”. Because the songs are in MIDI format, the program responds to the data that is sent from the song file and translates it into animation for certain instruments. This is how the animation can show so many things happening at once; animating all of this by hand would be extremely difficult.

I recommend looking up and viewing all the other Animusic segments on YouTube. There are many other fascinating segments out there that are just as good as the one I’ve shown above.