Stephen Malinowski has posted streaming vids of his Music Animation Machine, something he developed on his own using DOS programming while the music and graphic worlds continued to change all around him. Fans of Oskar Fischinger (the pioneer, art Deco music animator hired and fired for Disney's Fantasia) and Edward Tufte (the design guru who shows you how to present visual information cleanly and logically) should both be impressed by this project. Compositions by Bach, Beethoven, etc. slowly scroll left to right in a notation that looks like a MIDI editing grid, reduced to a range of basic colors against a black field; the parts playing in the exact present are highlighted in the center. The idea is to give the viewer an intuitive sense of what's happening in music, ostensibly for educational purposes, but I'd say they are basically artworks on the synesthetic frontier, tickling those synapses where musical and visual pleasure responses precisely overlap. 
Only one of the videos posted is Malinowski's own music, and it hints at creative possibilities for his medium that go beyond just animating the old masters. In the middle of the scroll (somewhere to the right of the screen shot here) occurs a dense Lego-like clump that goes on for just about as long as the ear wants to hear pure Lego, before returning to the tonal main theme. The intentional pushing and pulling between eye and ear-related expectations in a completely intuitively comprehensible way is an area that ought to be explored more. (Hat tip for the link to Cory Arcangel, whose own work deals with similar issues on an aggressive, cinematic scale, and with electro instead of Beethoven.)
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Stephen Malinowski has posted streaming vids of his Music Animation Machine, something he developed on his own using DOS programming while the music and graphic worlds continued to change all around him. Fans of Oskar Fischinger (the pioneer, art Deco music animator hired and fired for Disney's Fantasia) and Edward Tufte (the design guru who shows you how to present visual information cleanly and logically) should both be impressed by this project. Compositions by Bach, Beethoven, etc. slowly scroll left to right in a notation that looks like a MIDI editing grid, reduced to a range of basic colors against a black field; the parts playing in the exact present are highlighted in the center. The idea is to give the viewer an intuitive sense of what's happening in music, ostensibly for educational purposes, but I'd say they are basically artworks on the synesthetic frontier, tickling those synapses where musical and visual pleasure responses precisely overlap.
- tom moody 2-07-2005 6:00 am