Why can't musical notation be more like this?
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,509
    http://youtu.be/ipzR9bhei_o
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  • Liam
    Posts: 5,092
    That's the very early spreadsheet style. In the past couple of years, the animation/visualizations have become much more refined:

    Watch these on full screen:

    Bach: Goldberg Variations, Variation 5 (the whole Goldberg Variations series is just too awesome for words)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-Tw1sqzkfk

    The opening Goldberg Variation aria isn't rendered as arrestingly (it's closer to the original spreadsheet style); right now, they've only done through Variation 15:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2CXQQa7Z34


    Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 - movement 1:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iTPLgfmFdI


    Stravinsky's Rite of Spring:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02tkp6eeh40


    Debussy's Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YazhxBA7oo
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  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,482
    That provides no information on how to tune the intervals.

    Also, I'm not sure the rhythm is clear. Does a space after a note REALLY mean we should rest? And for how long? And are those rests officially part of the music? Someone needs to do a 17-part video series on this very important question.
    Thanked by 1ScottKChicago
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,092
    Adam

    I suspect your cat would call for mean temperament.

    In any event, I wonder what it would be like to expose elementary school children to scores this way...

    Polyphony next. (The only choral piece I noticed in the collection was the opening movement of Mozart's Requiem, which is not as good an example IMO.)

    Not being a fan of dense polychoral textures unless I am part of the chorus (as an audience member, my ears just get bored), it would be fun to see Spem in Alium rendered this way. For a few minutes, at least.
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  • francis
    Posts: 10,824
    Love it!
  • melofluentmelofluent
    Posts: 4,160
    Liam, I can name your tune in seven notes:
    Not being a fan of... Spem in alium.
    Spem is a piece that, IMO, can only be best appreciated as participant (FACP!), not an audience. I've been to many an ACDA national where thousands could have sung it en masse, yet no one dared try to schedule that.
    Can't Wood/Chonak or any of our resident techno geeks engineer an algorithm or matrix that could account for 250-300 singers being partitioned equally among the 40 voices and we just let Horst give it shot at Colloquium?
    (John Lennon voice)- "Imagine there's no choir, it's easy if you try...."
  • ScottKChicago
    Posts: 349
    I think one of the best ways to experience Spem would be the way a museum presented it somewhere: big empty room, 40 speakers arranged in "choirs" around the room; each speaker played one of the voices recorded together in time but in acoustically separate booths or something; listeners stood or walked within the large square formed by the sets of speakers and could focus on one choir for a while or stand close to the center for a balanced mix. And then try it a different way next time it started up.
  • melofluentmelofluent
    Posts: 4,160
    40 speakers arranged in "choirs" around the room

    Scott, why just stop with speakers, go all in Whitacre and have video feed of each singer in the quire?
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  • SalieriSalieri
    Posts: 3,177
    Kathy, didn't that notation exist 1,000 or so years ago?

    Magnus Liber Perotin Viderunt Omnes.jpg
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  • ScottKChicago
    Posts: 349
    Scott, why just stop with speakers, go all in Whitacre and have video feed of each singer in the quire?


    Absolutely, as long as the singers take some time during their tacet measures to look sideways at the singers on either side of them, a la The Brady Bunch.
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