While the Apocalypse – Blog

Stephen Malinowski is a self-described “Music Animation Machine,” with a penchant for creating animated graphical scores. Above, he does his thing with the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony 5.

How does he make this magic? Malinowski writes: “There were a lot of steps; here’s a short summary. I found a recording I could license and made the arrangements to use it. I found a MIDI file that was fairly complete, and imported that into the notation program Sibelius. I compared it to a printed copy of the score from my library and fixed things that were wrong… Then, I listened to the recording and compared that to the score, and modified the score so that the timings were more like what the orchestra was actually playing.

I exported this as a MIDI file and ran it through my custom frame-rendering software. Then, I made a “reduction” of the score and colored it to match the colors I was planning to use in the bar-graph score. Unfortunately, when I squished the bar-graph score enough to make room for the notation score, too much detail was lost, so I ended up deciding not to use the notation. Then I put all the pieces (rendered frames, audio, titles) together in Adobe Premiere and exported the movie as a QuickTime file. Then, I used On2 Flix to convert the final file into Flash format (so that YouTube’s conversion to their Flash format wouldn’t change it in unpredictable ways), and uploaded the result.”

Enjoy!

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