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Music Visualization – Debussy, Arabesque #1, Piano Solo

Animation created by Stephen Malinowski

This is a classical music piece composed by Claude Debussy. Stephen Malinowski, an American composer, pianist and software engineer, performed and transferred this classical music into a music visualization project. Stephen produces animated graphic scores and a system of colored shapes to represent elements in music. Particularly in this piece, Stephen mainly uses geometries like circles and lines. Each circle represent a note for piano, and the lines are the melody and flow of the music. When the music is playing, the geometries are animated with the rhythm. Stephen turns a music into a piece of computational artwork. With his algorithm system where he took information from MIDI file, he can generate graphical animations for every music. Stephen once used a quote from Eric Isaacson that “What you see is what you get”. Sometimes it is hard for audience to fully experience the music just by hearing. Therefore, with the help of animated graphics, audience can visually interact with the music. I’m inspired by Stephen Malinowski and I think that there should not just be one way to approach to an art pieces. We should be able to use as much senses as we can.