Recently I made a list of some long-abandoned projects that I thought it would be worth finishing just for the sake of finishing them. I guess I’m sort of tackling this list, as time allows, starting with those that require the least effort to complete. At the top of the list was that Pastorale piece that I posted a few days ago – which required the least effort because it was already finished. All that was left was for me to work up enough “aw, screw it, I’ll just say it’s done and be rid of it” to override the existing “maybe some day I can make it better.”
Requiring the second-least amount of effort was this little guy, abandoned at the 45 second mark since a year ago February. Perhaps you’ll agree with me that it’s particularly unsatisfying around 0:45. At the time, it was unsatisfying enough for me to discard it. But now I’ve pushed past that, with no intent to improve what was already there, just to finish it. And after, oh, 3 hours of additional attention, it’s finished, and I’m rid of it. Here you go.
Now for some longwindicating about it:
I started this at a time when I was excited by the idea that harmony, which is by far the subtlest and most involved aspect of music theory and is the hardest to elucidate to listeners, could be represented intuitively in animation by a rigorous visual scheme. I had seen a 2-dimensional map of pitches in harmonic space that I found compellingly “right” – it’s a triangular grid with pitches at the intersections; one axis corresponds to perfect fifths, one to major thirds, and the other to minor thirds. Chords can be visualized as two-dimensional figures formed by connecting the grid lines between the consituent notes: Major triads are triangles pointing in one direction, minor triads are triangles pointing the opposite direction. Various other chord types (diminished, sevens, whatever) create their own distinctive shapes on the grid.
The lovely thing about this configuration is that the endlessly tesselating grid allows you to watch the many “directions” a progression may lead: a progression can fall and fall and fall by fifths, say, and still end up where it started. On the grid, the shapes would walk, slinky-like, down one axis, until they’ve “screen-wrapped” back to where they began – or in the “wallpapered” grid, until they’ve found their way into an adjacent, identical tile of the tesselation. These visual analogues for harmonic movement seemed genuinely valuable and I wanted to see them animated.
Well, I did a few tests with this Bach prelude and they were pretty much a bust. Everyone I showed them to said they were confusing or seemed intuitively wrong. The harmonic movement, pictured, was kinetically dull compared to the actual sounds they were hearing. The lesson seemed to be that if the surface movement of the music wasn’t somehow captured there to appease the eye, the connection between the images and the harmony just wouldn’t read.
So I tried to put in some of the musical “surface” by having little dots traverse the harmonic shapes from pitch to pitch. But now the moving dots were so much more involving and noteworthy than the triangles or rhombuses or whatever they were tracing that the whole “harmonic visualization scheme” might as well have been thrown out the window. Furthermore, to whatever degree the harmonic movement came across visually, it still seemed too removed from the way these harmonies functioned and “felt” in the music. I think the moral is just the old music theory warning: that you can separate the elements of music – harmony, melody, rhythm, etc. – in a theoretical context, but in practice their effects are intricately interdependent.
Anyway, then I decided to do a version using the same basic concept (harmonies = 2-dimensional configurations) but without any scheme – to just go on what the music “felt like.” So that’s what this is. It’s just a little improvised choreography, which happens to be focussed on harmonic movement because so’s the piece.
I took the shortcut of just animating the “dot-goes-around-the-circle” once and using it over and over; that’s the kind of thing that Flash wants you to do. But the upshot is that I didn’t have a lot of flexibility about sync and there are a lot of places where I had to make things happen faster or slower or sooner or later than I wanted.
Plus the whole thing, as explained, is a defeated failure to achieve my original intent – a visual that would elucidate the music by being an exact analogue. This ends up being a more restrictive “reading” of the piece. That said, I do think that bare geometric shapes expressively passing through geometric formations are a good foundation for a visual analogue of music like this, and I’d like to think that this little doodle is, at least, less restrictive a “reading” than, say, the thing on Sesame Street where leaves washed down a stream to this music, or something like that. Or maybe it was dandelion seeds blowing away. Does anyone remember?
Some members of the viewing audience may also rightly point out that the flower-pattern of overlapping circles at the climax of this piece, and the “overlapping-circles” vocabulary in general, were featured in another Sesame Street classic. I wasn’t consciously trying to imitate it but by the end it was clear to me that I owed it an obvious debt. I don’t know whether the music for that was “something real” but it sounded, in retrospect, a lot like Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians – a small chorus of voices pulsing simple chords on “mi mi mi mi mi” or something. How about that one; can anyone refresh my memory about that one?
Why, WHY hasn’t Sesame Street released any of that stuff on DVD? They should make a DVD with a huge number of short bits and then have it “shuffle” for kids.
Well, anyway, that’s what there is to know about this. The title of this entry is no more (and no less) than a reference to the cootie shot. If only Bach had gotten his cootie shot. Think about it.
