Nowadays, many people have a home-entertainment system in their living room that consists of a 5.1 surround sound system, a DVD/CD player and a huge TV. Now ask yourself: If you play your favorite CD of classical music on that system but let your TV turned off - isn’t that a waste of a perfect, 42 inch wide, HD-ready (and very expensive) plasma screen?
Sure it is.
But what could one watch without destroying the atmosphere created by the fine tunes coming from your speakers? Well, why not watch a visualization of the music? “But most visualizations are boring”, you might say here, “they simply show some colourful orbs or sparks or whatever.”
And that’s where you are wrong.
With our project, we like to create a feeling of sitting right next to the orchestra pit while offering additional information about what instruments are played and how they are played at a specific point through visual aids.
The details:
Our visualization will show images or a short video of an orchestra playing some tunes. While a certain instrument is played on the MIDI synthesizer (due to technical reasons - we are working with Quartz Composer -, we have to limit our project to MIDI - for now), the corresponding musician or musicians in the orchestra will be “highlighted”, in some way or another (e.g. a “magnifying glass”-like effect). Additionally, there will be some kind of visualization of the volume and of the played pitch as well, though we have yet to decide what effect we are going to use.
Our primary goal is to provide visualization for classical music by restricting to those MIDI instruments one would find in a philharmony but if there is time left, we will try to implement further animations for some of the many other instruments a MIDI synthesizer can simulate.