New to classical? Want to get started?
You can go straight to my beginners guide to classical music or if you want jump right into working out which pieces you might like, hop on over to my guide to the composers.
More Open-Source Music
Hooray! Free sheet music for all!
I only just came across this site, even though all the drama of it reappearing happened half a year ago. I didn’t notice it back then because my visits into sheetmusicland only occur rarely. In fact I only go in search of scores for one of about, errr, two reasons:
- I’ve decided to try and play the piano again.
- I am obsessing about a particular passage in a piece of music, and want to know the key, or time-signature, or which instrument is making that funny noise (like that weird buzzing in Shostakovich 4)
Well hang onto your three-cornered hats, because today it was for another reason. The reason of animation. I had this totally awesome idea for animating a piece of classical music in which you’d have an orchestra layout:
And then the different sections would light up when they were playing. I thought it’d be interesting to get a visual feel for how the melodies are getting passed around, like you do with a live performance. Of course, in order to do this you need a copy of the score (or an insanely good ear and lots of time).
Instead of doing it manually — that is, looking at the score and by hand turning that into frames of animation — I want to automate it, at least a little bit. In the most basic version you don’t even need to try and work out which exact notes are being played. All you need to do is draw a line (or rather, a rectangular box) vertically across the clef and see how many black pixels there are inside. When a note is being played it will be darker than average. If you do this for the whole score you should have a pretty good indication of when notes are being played by each instrument.
Of course, things like this are always way easier to describe then to actually accomplish, but I’m gonna give it a shot when I get a bit of free time that isn;t spent playing on teh internets.
Tags: animation, classical music, orchestraNovelties
I hate the word “novel”. Scientists are obsessed with it. Not in the bookish sense, in the “like wow, that’s totally crazy” sense (which is how scientists talk). To give you an idea of how often it’s used, there are over 380,000 papers containing that word on PubMed (an index of US life-sciences papers) ALONE. That doesn’t include papers from physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. Novel this, novel that. Everything is freakin’ novel. It’s not an “unusual” enzyme, or a “creative” technique, they are “novel”. Eugh. I can’t stand it.
This rant (I think, I’ve completely sidetracked myself now) came from that being the first word which got all up in my grill when trying to discuss the following two… atypical… ways of interacting with sounds.
This is Visible Sound from the design group (whatever that is) with the appropriately pretentious name SOUNDS.BUTTER. It sews sounds. Well, their waveform anyway.
And then we have….
Which uses a handheld scanner to play notes which seem to (loosely) correspond to squiggles scribbled on a piece of illuminated paper.
Any more of this kinda thing out there? If I find about seven of them I can do one of those link-whoring list posts.
Tags: music, novel, technologyStuff White People Like
Item #108 over on Stuff White People Like is “Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music“. The post itself is schadenfreudelicious:
When a white person encounters another white person who actually enjoys classical music (exceptionally rare), it is often considered to be one of the most traumatic experiences they can go through.
“Really? Beethoven’s 5th Symphony….that’s your favorite.”
“um, no, I mean…”
“You sure it’s not Pachebel’s Canon?”
“well, ah, I like that, ah, song”
“sigh, of course you do.”
But like so much stuff on the internet, the real gems are in the post-article discussion. All 28 pages of it. Well, I’ve gotten to about page 4 so far, but I’m extrapolating. One of my favorite comments so far is this thought on music appreciation:
One sign that someone really does appreciate a certain genre of music is selective liking i.e. if that person also dislikes certain subgenres or artists within that genre. Especially if the disliked subgenre/artist is one of the more well-known or prominent ones.
I dunno. Perhaps that’s one of those observations which seems really profound until you think about it for five seconds. I still like it.
Tags: classical musicBreakfast is Ready!
I freakin’ love how excited the kids are when they find out what’s for breakfast:
Even Vurther Vasks
Man, these Vasks jokes in the title are getting funnier by the minute second. Replacing letters with V! What will I think of next? Bad joking aside (if you can bring yourself to forget it), I have decided the following section is my favorite bit of the cello concerto. At the mo’, anyway. These things tend to change.
Why? (I hear you cry out in delightful unison) I shall tell you. I like the contrast. I like I how within the writhing chaos there are melodies that move in and out of phase with each other. The best example: the way the brass pours together around the 27s mark. I love that crystallization of order, particularly contrasted against all the disorder. It’s analogous (in a sort of pretentious way) to the process I go through when getting to grips with every new piece of music.
Tags: classical music, vasks-
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