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Beethoven 5th Symphony 5 (graphical score animation)

FAQ

Q: What do the colors in the bar-graph score mean?
A: The colors show which instruments are playing. Here’s a chart:

http://www.musanim.com/pdf/Instruments_B5.pdf

Q: Please tell me more about the composer.
A: You can read about Beethoven here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beethoven

Q: Who is playing this?
A: I licensed this recording from

http://www.royalty-free-classical-music.org

It is performed by the Royalty Free Classical Music Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Dr. Keith J. Salmon. I don’t know anything beyond that about the recording (like, whether it is a real orchestra or synthetic, who are its members, when and where was the recording made, etc.)

Q: Is there a way I could make bar-graph scores like this myself?
A: The Music Animation Machine MIDI file player will generate this display; you can get the (Windows) software here:

http://www.musanim.com/player/

There are lots of places on the web where you can get MIDI files; I usually go to the Classical Archives site first:

http://www.classicalarchives.com/

Q: Could you please do a MAM video of _________?
A: First, check my “to do” list:
http://www.musanim.com/all/MAMToDoList.html …
If the piece isn’t listed, read the “Could you please do a MAM video of _________?” item on my main FAQ:
http://www.musanim.com/mam/mamfaq.html#copyright …
and if you think I’d consider doing it, email me (stephen at musanim dot com).

Q: How did you make this video?
A: 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 (b5_fullscore.pdf is a snapshot taken during this process; note that there was a piano part in the MIDI file — not something in the real score). 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 (see b5_timings_adjusted.pdf). I exported this as a MIDI file and ran it through my custom frame-rendering software. Then, I made a “reduction” of the score (b5_reduction.pdf) and colored it to match the colors I was planning to use in the bar-graph score (b5_reduction_color.pdf). 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. The PDFs mentioned in this description are in this ZIP file:

http://www.musanim.com/pdf/b5_scores.zip

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