The Große Fuge, played by the Alexander String Quartet, visualized by Stephen Malinowski with his Music Animation Machine in 2017. Beethoven's Grand Fugue for the string quartet not only demands...
The Große Fuge, played by the Alexander String Quartet, visualized by Stephen Malinowski with his Music Animation Machine in 2017.
Beethoven's Grand Fugue for the string quartet not only demands great technical skill to play, but also heightened attention to listen to. It used to be called an unplayable and unlistenable monstrosity of chaos. However, like Beethoven's other well-know works, it was governed by creative and well-formed internal logic, rather than conformance to tropes and routines.
This visualization is not just a graphical score. A typical music visualization model is that of a linear timeline, like a piano roll. But this is rarely how we listen to music.
The key insight in this visualization is the integral unity of phrases instead of individual notes. Phrases morphed out of a theme share some common visual feature. In particular, related phrases may get "stretched" or "compressed" in time, and woven into each other. In a single-timeline visualization, longer notes occupy greater shares on the timeline. But this is an unnecessary restriction -- when we write music down on the sheet, we don't draw the half note twice the size of the quarter note. Malinowski creatively used different-speed visual timelines to reflect the variations in time, creating a beautiful parallax effect.
The author provides the full "viewing guide" (PDF file), but it's not difficult to figure out what the visual elements signify, for they're well-designed and most importantly, congruent to the listening experience.
A summary of key elements from the viewing guide is here:
Each colour is for an instrument (Orange/Violin I, Magenta/Violin II, Green/Viola, Blue/Cello).
Sharp-edged ovals signifies the first theme and its related variations. Also, sharp-edged small circles represent a related, lively theme in major scale.
Blurred round dots, the second theme group; small blurred dots denote related melodies that serve as "connectors" or countermelodies.
Flowing line, the third theme group (with flowing melodies).
Blurred polygons for notes of an ambient quality, usually chord progressions.
Rhombuses for music lines characterised by rapid triplets related to the second theme.
Blurred rectangles for materials outside of the themes but are prominent in some way.
Wiggly lines, for trills of course.
This beautifully constructed, high-quality visualization helps us see how the structure of the piece unfolds itself.
The Große Fuge, played by the Alexander String Quartet, visualized by Stephen Malinowski with his Music Animation Machine in 2017.
Beethoven's Grand Fugue for the string quartet not only demands great technical skill to play, but also heightened attention to listen to. It used to be called an unplayable and unlistenable monstrosity of chaos. However, like Beethoven's other well-know works, it was governed by creative and well-formed internal logic, rather than conformance to tropes and routines.
This visualization is not just a graphical score. A typical music visualization model is that of a linear timeline, like a piano roll. But this is rarely how we listen to music.
The key insight in this visualization is the integral unity of phrases instead of individual notes. Phrases morphed out of a theme share some common visual feature. In particular, related phrases may get "stretched" or "compressed" in time, and woven into each other. In a single-timeline visualization, longer notes occupy greater shares on the timeline. But this is an unnecessary restriction -- when we write music down on the sheet, we don't draw the half note twice the size of the quarter note. Malinowski creatively used different-speed visual timelines to reflect the variations in time, creating a beautiful parallax effect.
The author provides the full "viewing guide" (PDF file), but it's not difficult to figure out what the visual elements signify, for they're well-designed and most importantly, congruent to the listening experience.
A summary of key elements from the viewing guide is here:
This beautifully constructed, high-quality visualization helps us see how the structure of the piece unfolds itself.