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Stephen Malinowski is a California based software engineer and musician.
He is best known for creating The Music Animation Machine, which is a project that sets graphic visuals to music. This project is very helpful for musicians and nonmusicians alike: for nonmusicians, it gives them a changing visual to go along with orchestra music, which helps keep them engaged. For musicians, this graphic shows all of the notes and rhythms in a piece of music, so it helps them see visually how their part fits in with the rest of the orchestra. Throughout the piece, different shapes and colors appear on the screen. The shapes represent which instrument is playing the line. Ellipses denote flutes, cymbals, and tam-tam; octagons for clarinet and bass clarinet; stars for double reeds; rectangles represent brass, timpani, guiro, and bass drum; and rhombuses are used to represent strings. My guess is that some symbols are also used for percussion because it is fairly clear in a piece of music if the listener is hearing a flute or cymbals, so using the same symbol to represent these two is more distinguishable than using the same symbol for, say, flute and clarinet. The length of all of the shapes represent the note length, or the rhythm. The color represents pitch, with blue as the tonic (the home key of the piece). While Malinowski did not have much artistic wiggle room with animating a piece that someone else composed, he did get to choose how he would animate it in terms of shapes and colors. His creative senses, therefore, are manifest in his animation choices.

Malinowski has animated several orchestral pieces. The piece I chose to link below is his animation of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. In this piece, the recording that Malinowski uses is a digitally performed version by Jay Bacal. Bacal used instrument software by Vienna Symphonic Library to make his recording. While Malinowski does use live orchestral recordings in many of his animations, The Rite of Spring is not yet in the public domain, meaning that licensing can be challenging. Malinowski says on his YouTube channel that he used Bacal’s version because it was the first recording that he was able to get permission to use. He notes that the benefit of using a synthetic recording is that it is note perfect and the articulations and rhythms line up, which increases clarity and creates a better study recording for students who are learning the piece. While nothing will replace the musicality and phrasing of a live orchestra, all orchestral recordings are subject to human error.

The Rite of Spring was a revolutionary and controversial piece when it was premiered. The piece is about a sacrificial ritual and includes musical dissonance and varying rhythm and time signatures that incited a riot during its premier. It is such an involved piece that this is a valuable resource for students who need to learn and distinguish their part while listening to a recording, as well as anyone who would like a better understanding of the piece.

The Rite of Spring, Part 1 (Igor Stravinsky)

Animation by Stephen Malinowski

Recording by Jay Bacal

A list of music animation techniques that Malinowski uses

A list of colors that Malinowski uses to represent pitch


Looking Outwards 4: Sound Art

The project that I chose to highlight is the “Weather Thingy” created by Adrien Kaeser. Asides from it’s name – I admire how it focuses on an intersection point between science, technology, and music. It’s almost like an embodiment of the BXA program at CMU. The multidisciplinary approach to solving the issue of how weather might distort sound is a concept I’ve never even thought of before. The module also has the capability of simulating sound as if it were in certain inspiring weather condition for the musician.

My knowledge of music is rather limited. I played the piano and the flute for a few years and my computing knowledge is also very limited. The creator didn’t delve into any detail on how the algorithms worked but I would assume that its takes in the weather data and based on for instance, the amount of rain, the midi data would adjust the sound settings to be more crisp despite being muddled by the rain. However, this is just an inference of the creator’s concept. The module itself embodies the creator’s artistic sensibilities as a musician, by showing just how sensitive and receptive he is of even the smallest change in
sound as a result of the weather.

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Swarm Study in action

Swarm Studies was created by Random International, a collaborative studio run by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass. Swarm Study I is one of the first installations. It is made with LEDs and custom electronics. Each light source sensor is “imbued with a collective behaviour” that respond to sound. When a person starts talking or clapping the light sources swarm in the direction of the sound creating a mini-animated light show.

I admire this piece because of amount of iterations it creates. Every sound produces a different reaction. The piece is unique to each person; two people can create vastly different effects on the lights. I admire the commentary on the dynamic between people and their instincts. When people approach the piece, they are unsure of what it is and how it works. It is intriguing to see how long it takes them to understand and how they react once they do.

The creators’ artistic sensibilities are rooted in the piece’s simplicity. The straight-forward nature of the piece invites interactivity. The artists’ wanted to force their audience to understand their own consciousness. With Swarm Study 1 they’re able to highlight human instincts based on their initial interactions with the piece.

Source, 2010:
https://www.random-international.com/swarm-study-i-2010

Looking Outwards – 04 – Sound Art

Camille Norment created an installation called Rapture in 2015. The piece highlights the dichotomy between peace and dissonance. At first glance, there are glass structures, speakers hanging from the ceiling, and a glass harmonica. The major sound elements create movement and excitment through dissonance – it cannot go unnoticed. There are twelve female voices coming from the speakers, clashing sounds from the violin, and the deep, clear humming of the harmonica. As the air molecules and hard molecules get excited, it shakes the glass and creates tension.

I admire that there are so many different ways to interpret the art. For instance, the sound of a glass harmonica could sound like a group of angels or something harmful at the same time. The algorithms that generates the work are the different sound frequencies and pitches that cause the glass to react as well.

Her artistic sensibilities manifest in the final form in that her piece is multisensory. There is a sculptural component, a composition by Norment, as well as a glass harmonica performance. She associates glass with the glass ceiling, a barrier that is invisible yet impenetrable. This social tension is reflected in her piece and leaves viewers with multiple different interpretions of her art.

Rapture by Camille Norment (2015)

Looking Outwards 04: Sound Art

Ernst Chladni is a physicist but incorporates his work into music and the use of music as vibrations to create art on a Chladni plate. A particle on the plate, sand, rocks, or in the video, couscous, will vibrate because of the friction between an object and the plate. In the video, it was a bow gliding across the edge of the plate, which made the couscous move to areas where there are limited vibrations. This process creates symmetrical patterns made with the coming together of the particles. Though the video is not an example of how digital sounds can create art, careful algorithms can create desired patterns with calculated vibrations. Every chladni plate has a different pattern because the way each plate vibrates is different. Not only is this art visually, but musically as well. The combination of both forms of art is an interesting exploration into how something that is heard can affect something that is seen.

To generate this type of pattern, the oscillation of the plate is precise, which creates the distant locations the particles will oscillate too. The symmetry and pattern can be predicted the more an object rubs against the plate. An artist can stop whenever they care to, however, the more they strike the plate, the more detailed each pattern becomes because of the longer vibrations the particles will experience. This style of art can be done by anyone and with any medium.

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Example of how the sonic algorithm connects similar note sequences

The project that I chose is the Eternal Jukebox, a program that analyzes a song for repeating notes and sequences of notes, so it creates an endless song. I admire the simplicity of the interface and how the visual communication relates to what the algorithm is doing to produce the sound. I think it works by using an algorithm to learn the sequence of notes or audio data as it sweeps through the song, so it can learn when to repeat sections without the song ending, using verses and choruses alternatively to make the song never-ending. There aren’t many artistic sensibilities involved aside from the visual interface, but there is some creative decision in how strict the algorithm is with cropping and replacing audio sequences.

https://eternalbox.dev/jukebox_index.html

Created by Paul Lamere in 2012, the process for the creation can be found at: https://musicmachinery.com/2012/11/12/the-infinite-jukebox/