Clever roller coaster animation for Zuerich Chamber Orchestra
Today, Very Short List presented a terrific promotion for the Zürich Chamber Orchestra.
The sheet-music staff for the last minute of the fourth movement of Beethoven student Ferdinand Ries’s Second Symphony — those five lines on which the clef signs and notes and rests sit — becomes a roller coaster. As the music builds steam, so does the coaster-cam P.O.V. pick up speed, taking hair-pin turns and swooping down vertiginous drops.Link
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Beautiful! I only wish it were longer.
Sidenote- Vertiginous is now my Word of the Day.
Reminds me of the PC game Audiosurf where you can "surf" rollercoasters created from music on your hard drive.
when an Amazon tribesman - who has never had vehicle other than feet or canoe - sees this 2-D clip, does he perceive motion? The visual distance, perspective and relative speed cues all belong to a culture with roads.
@The Bus - I thought same thing.
Love it!
Interesting idea, Takuan. We should drop an ASUS playing this to the uncontacted fellows and see how they review it.
Reminds me of guitar hero or rock band for some reason...
@3 Takuan, I think s/he does because running on foot, or fast paddling in a canoe produces a similar motion. Not on the order of a roller coaster, but still in the same vein. I would think the issue would be with his/her understanding of the concept of music on paper.
now if anyone with a sense of connecting the images to the sound gets a hold of this, that will be really interesting. they totally missed the huge visual impact of tying the melody to the staff, even if it means creating a line of music that represents the melody rather than an one instruments part.
i'm really surprised such a clever clip missed the mark by such a wide margin.
Now you can legitimately say "classical music makes me sick. . . I feel queasy."
Rollerskater,
You were right on there. Besides the fact that the playback was choppy for me, I was sitting here wondering which instrument that line was from and if the animation was accurate.
Liquidcola,
Yeah Guitar hero for classicists. Violin hero maybe?
Well, looks like I missed it: YouTube has already pulled the video. :o(
Tom
I was immediately reminded of Chuck Jones' 1960 cartoon for Warner Bros. entitled: "High Note"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053909/
he not only used the musical staff of "the Blue Danube" as a landscape - he made the notes come alive as characters. Remarkably creative stuff.
Cheers.
Re: #12 (Tomas): The video seems to still be up. It's playing even as I type this.
Re: #9 (Rollerskater): The path we follow is that of the first violins. (At the very start, we see three staves: first and second violins and violas, apparently the only instruments playing at that point in the music. It's a commonly-used printers' convention when publishing orchestral scores to show the staves of all the instruments on the first page of the score, then omit the staves of instruments that aren't playing on a given page.) Naturally, since they've chosen a "roller-coaster" motif, we can't just switch tracks to hear the instruments that are most audible at any given time. But in this particular excerpt, much of the dominant melody is carried by the first violins once the ride hits full swing; so it was decided to feature that staff, even though we mostly hear the violas and later cellos & double-basses during the opening build-up.
If you can get a hold of "The Norton Scores: An Anthology for Listening," a two-volume set of books aimed at music-appreciation students, you'll see an interesting feature: In the orchestral music, a gray half-tone screen is superimposed over the music, with rectangular cut-outs revealing which one instrument is most audible at the time. (You'll also get a nice collection of a wide range of musical scores, a must for any serious student of composition.)
#12 Tomas - seems to be working for me.
Wonderful concept. Definitely agree with 'Violin Hero' - have we all seen 'accordion hero' ? :D