LO-04

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