Music Animation Machine by Stephen Malinowski

Conventional music notation evolved to serve the needs of composers, performers, and conductors. By contrast, Music Animation Machine is a musical score for listeners.

Music Animation Machine (MAM) is an animated visual display that represents a musical performance. The display is synchronized with the sounds of the piece it represents. Instead of the symbols of conventional music notation, a MAM score uses colored bars to represent the notes of a piece. The vertical placement of each bar indicates the pitch of its note, the horizontal placement indicates its timing relative to the other notes of the piece, and the length of the bar shows its duration. These bars scroll across the screen as the piece plays; when a bar reaches the center of the screen, it brightens as its corresponding note sounds. The center of the screen is always the now point.

A MAM score is like a conventional musical score in that it gives information about the pitch and timing of the notes of a piece. As in conventional notation, musical events at different points in the piece can be seen at once, allowing recognition of and comparison between patterns. Unlike a conventional score, the MAM uses a single pitch space. In conventional notation, different instruments are distinguished by placing the notes for each instrument on its own staff. This makes it difficult to see the relationship between the notes of two instruments, since the viewer must mentally combine two or more staves into one. In MAM notation, all the notes are on the same staff, with different instruments indicated by color.

MAM notation shows the actual irregular timings of notes in a performance, not the mathematically exact timings of conventional notation. The MAM notation can be colored to highlight thematic units, instrumentation, harmony, or dynamics. MAM scores can be understood by very young children: children as young as eighteen months have demonstrated that they recognize the relationship between the sound and the visual display. Many people are visually oriented and more able to pay attention to visual objects than sounds. This may be the reason that a visual analogue to a piece of music makes it more real to children.

Viewing QuickTime movies

In an attempt to keep download times to a minimum, the resolution of the QuickTime movies has been reduced from what is used in the videotapes. The result is that viewers must choose between image size and image quality. If the image is small, it will scroll smoothly and look clear but it may be hard to see all the notes (especially the shortest ones).
If the QuickTime window is resized to make the image larger, the notes will be easy to see, but the scrolling will be jerky and the bars may have little dots in them. In the future, when Internet connection speeds are higher and ISP traffic charges are lower, the resolution of these movies will be increased. Until then, the way to see the scrolling scores at their best is to view them on videotape (and, hopefully, soon, DVD).

Stephen Malinowski

Fugue

Dedicated to Stanley Krebs

The fugue, an original composition by Stephen Malinowski, is accompanied by a graphical score, in the form of QuickTime software.

Stanley Dale Krebs (1928-1977) was a talented performer, a gifted composer, a gentleman, ascholar, and a mensch. He was also the only composition teacher I ever had who understood why a 20th century composer (such as myself) would want to write fugues. A fugue-lover himself, he was the regular instructor of Canon and Fugue at the University of California at Santa Barbara (where I studied composition). I often visited him during his office hours to play fugues with him, 4-handed, at the piaNo. After he died (alas, too soon!), I wrote this fugue in his memory. The first fugue Stanley and I ever played together was the G-minor fugue from the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. My fugue to Stanley took the key (at least, the key signature; it’s hard to say what key the piece is in), the meter, and the first two notes (in reversed order) from that fugue. Here’s the theme: