Category Archives: Animation

June 27, 2006

Circle Circle Dot Dot

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.

Seven-ring circus.

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.

November 1, 2005

As promised: Prometheus light show!

Several months ago, I promised a “multimedia presentation” to accompany my comments on Scriabin’s Prometheus. Well, here it is. Thanks for your patience.

The rambling below was meant to precede the show, but I’ve been advised that that’s not the way to do things, so here you go. Click on the picture of Scriabin’s pathetic personal 12-bulb doodad below to see the animation in a new window. It might take it a second to load the music clip. Yes, it just starts in the middle of the action like that.

lamps.jpg

Okay, so, now that you’ve seen that – to recap: the piece is scored for piano, orchestra, and “light keyboard,” the last of which is an imaginary instrument, notated like an organ, that produces colored light. The part for this tastiera per luce is a single staff at the top of the score and contains two voices*: one very slow (each note generally lasting for an entire section of the piece) and the other somewhat faster, generally moving whenever the harmony changes.

These notes (if read in the normal way, i.e. as musical notes and not colors) correspond to the harmonies in the music. What I just said is only very roughly accurate, but right now I don’t feel like going into technical detail about how Scriabin’s harmonic thinking actually works – I can hear the massed forces of the academy marching on the other side of that particular ridge. For our purposes let’s just say that every note in the piece is drawn out of a certain chord, which gets transposed all over the place, and every note in the luce part is what Scriabin thought of as the “root” of that chord, at that point in the music.

Why are there two voices? The faster-moving voice reflects the musical foreground; the slower-moving voice reflects the underlying harmony, a harmony which is not always necessarily being played, though it often is, at least in part. This is a lot like the distinction, in normal harmonic analysis, between the key that a piece (or section) is in and the chord that is actually being played at a given time. But the issue gets confused here because I’m talking about “harmonies” as opposed to “keys” – and because, like I said above, I’m not really talking about “harmonies,” – they’re really more like “scales” or “chords that are treated as scales.” Scriabin boasted, with good reason, that in this work, melody and harmony were indistinguishable.** “Tonalities,” I suppose you could say, though it’s a bit misleading. The extremely loaded word “set” is actually fairly appropriate to Scriabin, but I’m not going there.***

Whatever these harmony-ish things are, they govern the music, Scriabin identified them with certain notes, and Scriabin identified certain notes with certain colors. So those are the colors meant to be produced by the light keyboard: the colors of the two harmonies that make up the music at a given point; the underlying “what key are we in” harmony, and the moment-to-moment harmony.

I think I read somewhere that Scriabin intended the underlying color to appear as a sort of field against which the other colors would appear. I can’t find that quote right now, and maybe I just made it up. Anyway, it seems reasonable enough. I know for certain he said something about envisioning the lights as tongues of flame.

This multimedia presentation (read: cartoon) is basically the result of my being curious to see whether it would add anything to my appreciation of the music to see it with the intended colors. The colors you see in the animation are taken directly from the indications in the score (via Scriabin’s “color wheel” as compiled by Bulat Galeev and included in the Dover edition of the score), and handled with a little license, in order to suit the animation. The musical excerpt is from early on in the piece; it’s the first statement of the main theme in its extended form, the same material that will come back near the end with terrifying grandeur. All but the very end of the excerpt have the underlying pitch of B-flat: “Rose (or Steel).” Then, just as the excerpt is ending comes the shift to B natural: “Blue (or Pearly Blue).”

As you see, I put the “Rose (or Steel)” background through a lot of changes (some of which might be a bit much, I admit), and at one point it is overwhelmed by the foreground. But to my mind this is in keeping with the harmonic life of the piece, and hopefully the formal sense of the whole still reflects the formal progress of the piece more or less faithfully. Of course, the excerpt is so short (about 2 minutes out of the 23 in the piece) that you can’t really get a sense of form – the best I can hope for is that this all feels like one coherent “section,” with a new section about to begin at the very end, and with one very brief premonition of yet a different section popping up for a second.

My other motivating interest, here, is in the possibility that well-choreographed music visualizations might be able to actually elucidate the formal design of the music they reflect; Fantasia as actual music education, so to speak. Far too often (even in Oskar Fischinger’s work) the logic behind animation-to-music is not inherently musical. I tried hard to keep the “sense” of the music in the details of the choreography. But it’s very difficult not to let this stuff become merely fanciful… This is something that I think about a lot and I’ll probably be working up a few more of these things in the future.

I dunno, I have a lot more than that to say about my choices here and whether they are good ones, but maybe now’s not the time.

What this is: Animation to part of Prometheus, based on the colors prescribed in the score (at least by name), and attempting to reflect the music visually in a musically-relevant way.

What this is not: A realization of Scriabin’s light keyboard part and/or a visualization of Scriabin’s stated conception of the piece. If I had a team of really good animators, though, I would love to try something like that. If anyone out there wants to fund that project, by all means bring it on.

* For you non-musicians, that means two notes are playing at any given time. Although sometimes one voice takes a break, and sometimes the two voices coincide on the same note, but they are still notated as distinct.

** His boasting quote continues with a lovely image, at least in translation: “There is not a wasted note, not a wedge where a mosquito could get in and bite.”

*** But I do want to note here that a “normal” harmonic analysis of Prometheus – i.e. one based on the standard tonal system (which, I would argue, governs the way we hear the piece regardless of how it was constructed) would not, generally, name Scriabin’s notes as the functional harmonies. In fact, it would not always agree with Scriabin as to when the harmony was or wasn’t changing. So it is important to recognize that the light keyboard is not showing us “what the harmony is” in any traditional sense – the theoretical constructs to which the colors correspond are themselves totally idiosyncratic to Scriabin.