Music Animation Machine: This free app will make cartoons out of your music #MusicMonday
This looks like it would be really fun to play around with! Via Fast Co. Design.
Unless you’re a musician—and sometimes, not even then—you’re probably not very comfortable with reading musical notation. Sure, we might be taught in grade school music class. We might be able to plod along, but we hardly find it intuitive.
The same can’t be said for this animated score of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto (K.622, Second Movement, Adagio) as performed by Bruce Edwards of the Fulda Symphonic Orchestra. It makes following a complicated classical performance as simple as the old Follow the Bouncing Ball cartoons, and as fanciful as Walt Disney’s Fantasia.
The animation uses colored diamonds, dots, lines, and waves to distinguish between clarinets, cellos, and other instruments. It was created by Stephen Malinowski, whose program, the Music Animation Machine, a nearly 40 year computer project to make music notation more intuitive to follow.
And if you like that? You can watch hundreds more on this YouTube channel. Because, from Mozart to Metallica, any piece of music can be animated this way.
The Music Animation Machine is free to download on Windows here.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
