I found out about the Music Animation Machine a few years ago but just stumbled across it again yesterday. Amazing. There are several more videos on the MAM website in various digital forms including DVD.
“The idea for the Music Animation Machine started with a hallucination that happened while I was listening to one of Bach’s sonatas for unaccompanied violin …”
Explanation and more videos after the jump.
Why? From the MAM FAQ:
“I began my adult life expecting to be some kind of composer/performer/teacher. However, it turned out that …
… my memory was too poor to be a good composer. Hindemith wrote “We all know the impression of a very heavy flash of lightning in the night. Within a second’s time we see a broad landscape, not only in its general outlines but with every detail. Although we could never describe each single component of the picture, we feel that not even the smallest leaf of grass escapes our attention. We experience a view, immensely comprehensible and at the same time immensely detailed, that we never could have under normal daylight conditions, and perhaps not during the night either, if our senses and nerves were not strained by the extraordinary suddenness of the event. Compositions must be conceived the same way. If we cannot, in the flash of a single moment, see a composition in its absolute entirety, with every pertinent detail in its proper place, we are not genuine creators.”
I think he’s mistaken about the possibility of instantaneous perception, but he’s right that to be a good composer, one must be able to remember all the details of a composition well enough to evaluate it from lots of angles easily. It turned out that my memory was only adequate for writing short pieces at one sitting.
… I was too self-critical to enjoy performing. Even when the audience raved, I was disappointed and felt that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
… I lacked the necessary level of empathy to be a good teacher.
Still, I loved music, enjoyed playing music in private if not in public, and felt that some of my musical ideas and experiences were worth sharing, so I worked on my sight-reading, learned to program computers, and started trying to make computer software to help people see what’s inside my head (and theirs).”
Time-line of the Music Animation Machine (and related experiments)
“If you are writing to tell me about a hiccup cure, let me save you some time; you needn’t include:
The assertion that the cure always works. Everybody who writes me believes this, and I will assume this is true for you.
A request (or suggestion) that I try the cure. I don’t get hiccups often, and when I do, they usually go away quickly on their own, so I’m not a good subject for testing.”
