The Music Animation Machine

From my dear friend Maria Popova's blog:
In the 1970s, composer, inventor and software engineer Stephen Malinowski had a hallucination. He envisioned an easier, more visual way of reading music scores. A friend of his suggested he animate the bar-graph scroll and another proposed doing it with a… gasp… computer. In 1985, Malinowski created the first version of the Music Animation Machine and, a quarter century later, it remains a treasure trove of mesmerizing music visualizations.
Read more at Maria's blog BrainPickings.org

(and check out the free visual harmonizer for ipod )

How a tree sweater reminded me that music is everywhere

Treesweater_01

Treesweater_02

I was walking in the park next to my place in Philadelphia and suddenly noticed something that wasn't there before. Someone decided that not only fancy mini-size dogs has to have cute sweaters in the winter, but also trees might be cold and need some attention.

One tree in the park was wearing a colorful stripes sweater. This magnificent sight made me stop and think this spontaneous chain of thoughts: I wondered — what if each stripe produce a different note of the musical scale — so you could play music by touching the stripes on the tree? The tree is like a Y-axis, its height can naturally represents climbing up the musical scale. Then I thought: what if the tree was reacting with sound to tree-huggers? So if I hug a tree with one finger, it makes one note, but the more surface I cover with my body — both hands, arms, torso — the richer and fuller the sound and harmony gets...

Then I noticed a squirrel... I watched its movement: rapid jumps followed by sudden pauses. I heard in my head the type of melody that its movement may produces. And then I thought about a cow... Cows play totally different tunes than squirrels do, when they move. And than everything around my started playing. All I was looking at produced melodies, patterns and harmonies.

I came back home and kept asking myself: what music can be produced naturally from the anatomy of a chair? The toaster? My plant? My lamp?

Music is everywhere, whether we hear it or not. It's hiding in the structures of things, in the motion of beings. All is needed is to listen more carefully. Listen.