Caddickisms

This excites me on many levels. It’s so simple, and yet so cool.

It’s not at all new either. In fact, there’s a multi-award winning film that uses something very similar in its most famous scene. (Comment below if you know what it is.)

What is it, and why does it excite me?

Don’t laugh.

It’s a bar graph.

Yes, seriously.

Wait, wait! Don’t go… it’s not just any old bar graph. This one moves. And it lights up. And there’s music.

Starting to see the cool yet?

Yeah, I probably wouldn’t either, if I was just reading this. Stick with me.

Let’s package it this way: This is a different way to experience music – visually and accurately. We’ve all seen light shows of one kind or another accompanying music, but most of the time it’s just pulsating to the beat or rhythms or some approximation thereof. What we’ve got below is accurate parts, durations, and relative pitch of the notes in a song depicted in a way that you could actually learn something about the music itself.

Check this out as a “simple” example from J.S. Bach:

I call that simple only because it’s one instrument and pretty easy to see how the thing works. But check out the first movement from Mozart’s Symphony #40 in G-minor (one of his best, for my money). For some people this may be a better example because you can actually follow a single instrument through the symphony (for instance, green is the violin (with other strings in shades of green)):

Beyond that fact that I just think it looks neat, I really think this could be used to get people to think of music in a different way. It could be used to help people see the connection between music and math (you can’t get a bar graph without math!). In our increasingly visually driven society, it could be used to help show the ebb and flow of the musical lines, and the intertwining of parts to create the whole. Heck, maybe it could even be used to help the deaf experience music in a new way (maybe it already is, for all I know).

Because this is based on MIDI, it would be pretty easy to single out a given part or parts for display to focus on just the brass, for example. All sorts of ways to slice and dice this.

Like I said, this excites me in many ways: as a music lover, as a technology geek, as an (extremely) amateur composer, and as a trainer/educator. It’s just plain cool.

In case you’re interested in how this works (from the technology side), it’s actually pretty simple. It’s a visual representation of MIDI, which has been around for quite a while (I actually programmed my computer to play the “Ghostbusters” song in MIDI back in the 80’s). MIDI is a mathematical representation of pitch and duration for each note in a score/song. Run that MIDI file through this free software, and it reads all that math and gives you that scrolling bar graph (or even a few other visual options). It’s fun!

Do did you figure out which movie used a colored bar representation for music yet? Here’s a hint… ba-ba-da-BUM-BUM!

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Lee has his weekly Top 5 list up over at Quit Your Day Job. This time it’s the “Five songs that have left their footprint in my life.” That’s a tough list to come up with. I’m glad he didn’t say 5 favorite songs, though – that would have been impossible. If we’re just looking for five songs that made a mark in my life, I might be able to do that.

In fact, the first to come to mind is an easy one. This song was my introduction to “grown up” music in the latter half of the seventies. I think I was 7 or 8 when my dad brought a record into my room and said, “here, I think you’ll like this song.” We both sat down with the portable record player and listened to this:

Now, the “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” is not my favorite Simon and Garfunkel song, but it was the gateway into their music and the wider world of non-kids music, so easily gets the number one spot here. The album it came from, “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme” would similarly get the #1 spot if we were talking about albums. It contains some absolute classics, including “Scarborough Fair/Canticle”. To go a bit off on a side track, 99% of the time, “Fair” (which is a traditional tune, not Simon’s) is performed live without “Canticle” (which is Simon’s), because it’s just impossible to do as a duet. I found this version, though, from Andy Williams’ show in the ’60s that is absolutely beautiful. All of them were in their prime when this was recorded.

Simon and Garfunkel just had an incredible sound. Wonderful, pure harmonies. Wanting to be able to sing like that, as much as anything, got me to join various choirs and appreciate the art of music, which then pulled me (eventually, and at times kicking and screaming) into the world of classical music and a deeper understanding of music generally. In a real way, S&G were the introduction to my musical journey.

Along those same lines, I first heard popular music orchestrated with strings in The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” That was the first time it occurred to me that classical music still had relevance and could be “cool.”

Number 3 in this impactful music list is connected to my wedding (and many others). Steven Curtis Chapman created a perfect wedding song in “I will be here,” as it captures what most grooms want their wives to understand. That my wife’s family (who are all sickeningly talented) performed it for us just cements its importance.

At number 4, and again associated with my wedding, though indirectly, is “The Love of God.” This is a hymn that I had never heard before listening to the arrangement by 4Him, and it hit me on multiple levels. First the words are tremendous (especially the last verse: “Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made; Were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade; to write the love of God above would drain the oceans dry, nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky”). Second, it reawakened in me an appreciation of hymns. Most hymns had felt stodgy and detached to me for a long while. Third, it gave me a better sense for how effective an alternate arrangement of a song could turn out – while still retaining the basic melody, this arrangement goes in a direction I never would have conceived, and it works amazingly well. [I couldn't find the song on YouTube, but you can hear it here. {gaahhh... I gotta figure out how to get "object" tags to work right in WordPress!}]

Finally, we come to number 5. Soooo many contenders for this spot. I actually feel stress in making a call on this. Billy Joel, Steve Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, Glad, Phil Collins, John Williams, James Taylor, Handel, and Mozart, among others, all sit together waiting for their spots on this list. They each have at least one song that could easily fit. Heck, I could probably focus an entire post on each of their libraries individually and the multiple, deep impacts they’ve had on me.

So… what to do? I’m going to go in a new direction on this one. My #5 spot is going to “The Anniversary Song” by my brother-in-law, Jim. He’s kind of shy about sharing his stuff publicly, and he writes, performs, records, mixes, and produces them himself, so I don’t want to put it out there without getting his permission. This particular song is a thank you to his parents on their anniversary and a reminder of their legacy. Though completely its own, it’s very reminiscent in conception to “Leader of the Band” by Dan Fogelberg in its general style and parallels between music and family. It’s an excellent song, and in my opinion could do well in mass market. It’s not so much the song itself, though, but that it was created by someone I knew who had no formal music training – though he’d been involved in music all his life. We also have many of the same musical tastes, so I identified with what he was doing, and that spurred me to finally get around to writing some of my own music. His musical talent is far beyond mine, and I think my skills lie in a different area of music, but his efforts and success with that song (and the others on the two albums he produced privately) inspired me to motion. As a result, I’ve arranged a few hymns, written a few not so good things and a few passable things, and continue to work on music (primarily choral) as a hobby.

So there you have it. Plenty of stuff left off, but that’s my list for now. Ask me again tomorrow, maybe you’ll get a different list.

What would you put on your list?

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