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John Coltrane's famous Giant Steps solo has been animated A few months ago, as I was Youtubing I saw that a young video producer at Emerson College, Dan Cohen, had done a hand-made animation of John Coltrane's saxophone solo Giant Steps. The video animates a sheet music transcription of the Giant Steps solo. The notation that describes each sound Coltrane produces appears in the video frame at the instant he plays it. Cohen keeps the animation focus on the measures of the score where Coltrane's jet of notes will next appear. It gives the impression that the notation representation of each new saxophone sound flashes into existence on a blank musical staff at the instant it sounds. The staff scrolls briskly to the left to carry away what we've already heard and continues to drift right whenever a long duration note sounds to give a sensation of forward motion. I love to watch it. Seeing the notation animated this way seems to make my hearing more acute, and increases my appreciation for what I'm listening to. You can start to latch on to elements of Coltrane's style by watching this. He liked to do runs that rush from low on the horn up to hits highest range to loft a pitch that hangs there for a moment before gravity pulls the line back down. You can easily see and feel the many launches that hurl those long notes up to float on high during the course of the solo. Amazing YouTube Stats The YouTube stats for this vid amazed me. At this moment, YouTube shows 350,000 views for it, 900 comments with someone making a positive comment nearly every day for more than a year. It has a 5-star (best) rating and was rated by 1376 viewers. Why amazed? A decade or so ago when I tracked such things, I remember hearing that the Giant Steps album usually sold around 10,000 copies a year. So this video is exposing 35 times more people to Coltrane's music in a year than has been the typical experience for Atlantic Records jazz music business despite its promotional efforts. (Actually, Atlantic rarely does anything to promote its back catalog and waits for word of mouth to bring another customer to the door. The word of mouth can lead to profitability years or decades after release. I wonder why Atlantic doesn't place ads for the album with this video). Other thing is, with this recording you're hearing a real early manifestation of an important part of Trane's style showing itself for the very first time. Art Taylor, a wonderful drummer, plays less conversationally than usual because of the tempo and Tommy Flanagan, an equally wonderful pianist, sounds like like he's scuffling and uncomfortable with the tune. They learned what the music was and how they were going to play it when they showed up at the studio. Flanagan didn't have the benefit of a year's practice to get in shape for the performance. He must have gotten a cold sweat when he realized it would be played at that tempo. When he formed his own band and it became possible to play every night with drummer Elvin Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner, the music got much looser and much more enjoyable to listen to. My point is, Giant Steps is not Coltrane's most powerful , most important or best work by any means. Still, 35000 viewers in a year, 5 star rating, 1376 raters, 900 comments. Young jazz students do like to geek out and focus inordinately on this solo. Why the obsession? Coltrane, according to his friends testimony, practiced for longer than a year so that he could improvise fluidly over the Giant Steps chord sequence that he invented. At first he didn't even have a definite melody to play over it. The chords change very frequently in this tune, mostly twice per measure, and move in unusual directions. To make it harder, it's usually played at a blazing tempo. (Doesn't have to be though, Phineas Newborn played it slowly on piano, and it's beautiful). it's a great challenge for a soloist to invent music that makes sense in this setting when they take on these constraints. Over the years since 1959, musicians have wanted to study Coltrane's improvised ideas in order to see how he solved his Giant Steps problems. Musicians with highly devloped ears, to satisfy their compatriots curiosity, have produced transcriptions, which are sheet music representations of Coltrane's solo. A lot of times folks who do this work make use of technological assistance when they encounter music that travels as fast as Trane's does. There are tape recorders and now software that can slow a track down to half or quarter speed. I saw my first Giant Steps transcription in DownBeat magazine in 1971. Trombonist and educator David Baker did that one. Andrew White, who has transcribed virtually every Coltrane solo recorded (almost 700 last I checked), has done it also. How Cohen did it Dan Cohen found a copy of the transcription book "John Coltrane Plays Giant Steps", published by Hal Leonard, that provides transcriptions for the eight different solos Coltrane recorded for Atlantic Records before they chose the one that they wanted to present on the Giant Steps album. (It's another mystery why Hal Leonard doesn't advertise alongside this video. A lot of the comments ask, where did the notation come from? Where can I get the sheet music?) Cohen took progressive photos of each measure of the solo, showing how the flow of notes filled out empty music staves as the performance progressed. He inserted Coltrane's mp3 recording of the solo as his video soundtrack. He stitched these photos into his movie by flashing the image that reveals the proper new note at exactly the instant it starts to play in Coltrane's solo. The production cost is extremely high Cohen reports in one of the early comments of the YouTube posting that it took him 10 days to produce hs video. When I saw this I realized that despite the fact I liked the animation so much I wouldn't be seeing many other efforts that would be created using this production technique because of the tedium and time expense that is involved. I'd guess that once you had done of these, you wouldn't be keen to repeat the experience. And there won't be many folks around with the musical knowledge and video production skills to do this work well. And it's too bad too, Because there are literally thousands of recorded solos that listeners might enjoy watching in this fashion. I thought, "Without much of a stretch, I can do that in software much less expensively, no self-torture required" I realized once I saw Cohen's animation though, that I was pretty close to being able to do something similar using I software I've written. My SongTrellis Music Editor (still beta) has used a different animation technique for a very long time. When a user plays a score, each note played is colored red during the instants that it sounds during playback. When the next note in a voice sounds, the one that goes silent is redrawn in black and the new one turns red. This technique produces a band of reddened, vertically aligned notes which demonstrates how the notation is performed, really showing what the notation means. The problem I always had with it was that experienced musicians could follow the flow of red across the score pretty easily but that neophytes were not used to tracking along this way and would get lost. Also, because it was hard to track, it wasn't involving enough. About six weeks ago, I figured out how to clear an entire score to bare music staves when a user plays an entire score and to clear selected notes when they ask to play a selection, in a way that makes sense with the way the editor already operates. This would let me emulate the part Cohen's technique that reveals a note the instant that it sounds. I got that scheme to work two weeks later. A month ago, I was able to capture my Play animations and record those in a QuickTime movie. Three videos that use reveal-as-played animation
Animations tightly synchronized to origial performance Previous work I did made it possible to tightly synchronize transcription score animations to the original transcribed performance during playbacks within the editor. About ten days ago, I finally adapted the code that produces the synchronized transcriptions to record THESE as QuickTime movies using the reveal-as-played technique. I can produce animations now that, to my eye and ear, produce most of the impact of Cohen's anaimation. I'm anxious to hear others opinions. The question is, how much coolness is contributed by making the newly played notes appear at one point in the frame, and scrolling the score left to make room for the next notes? I can scroll if folks feel too much coolness is lost. I think that the reveal-as-played technique is providing most of the value though. I value your feedback on this issue. How I produce tight synced animations I've typed in a faiirly large number of transcription scores for my editor for my own music study. To do tight synchronization, I measure the beginning times for the beginning and end of a solo and a sprinkling of notes throughout the solo performance. I label those notes in the score with my editor to tell it when those notes should begin to play in a performance, and from this the editor interpolates to calculate beginning times for all of the notes in the score. When I've recorded enough in between notes, the editor flashes new notes onscreen at close enough time to when they sound in the score, that a viewer gets the impression that the played score performs the solo and causes it to sound just the way it was originally recorded. What transcription animations have been produced in synchronized format? I have six of these in hand now that are synchronized to their mp3 performance. I have tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter playing Crisis from Freddie Hubbard's Bluenote Records album "Ready For Freddie", Sonny Rollins playing The Everywhere Calypso from "Sonny Rollins Next Album" on Milestone Records, John Coltrane playing the "Resolution" section that is Part II of "A Love Supreme" and "Dear Old Stockholm", both recorded by Impulse! Records, Charlie Parker playing Yardbird Suite, trumpeter Lee Morgan playing The Joker from his "Search For The New Land" album, another Blue Note recording, Oy! I need clearances! I don't violate copyright ever. I need to get clearances from the copyright holders to publish these so that the public can view these. This will be a new experience for me. I fear I won't enjoy it. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. I'll be approaching Concord Music Group for clearances for Rollins The Everywhere Calypso, EMI for Shorter's Crisis solo and Lee Morgan's "The Joker " solo, Universal Music Group for Coltrane's "Resolution" and "Dear Old Stockholm" solos, and Criterion Music Group for Charlie Parker's Yardbird Suite. If anyone has experience or lore that would help me to deal with these monoliths, please talk to me. The goal was to do produce animations easier and faster than Cohen. How did you do? It takes me 20 minutes or so to enter a page of fairly dense notation with several hundred notes on it. I can type in a jazz or rock score that plays for three or four minutes in two or three hours. If the soloist's tempo in a performance is steady, I sometimes can achieve tight synchronization by simply measuring the intial attack of the first note and the final decay of the last note in the score I'm animating. Most frequently I have to do 8 or 10 measurements of notes in-between down to thousandths of seconds using Audacity, and then enter the measurements into the score. This can take two or three hours, especially when attempting the synchronization reveals brings to light errors in the transcription that need to be fixed. When notes are labelled with their start time, I'm currently asking for the elapsed time for the note pitch to start, measured from the begining of the solo. This forces the producer to calculate that interval for every measurement. I should just record the time from beginning of track which can be read directly off of the Audacity window. This would streamline the process considerably. Compared to the production costs of the original recordings, it costs very little time to produce tightly animated transcription scores provided a transcription already exists. If you don't transcribe yourself, you're dependent upon someone who can do this heavy lifting. Someone able to do this should be generously compensated for their efforts, because it is extremely hard work. Can you do anything that Cohen couldn't? It's super easy to vary how much of the score to reveal at a time during animations, by changing its frame size. It takes about a minute to render a new score and about five minutes more to get it in shape to post online. I can verify that a transcription is correct by playing tight synced MIDI synthesis over the top of the original performance. If the MIDI instrumental sounds closely match the pitches and durations of what the soloists play, I can be certain that I'm using an accurate transcription. I can easily render animations at arbitrarily slower or faster tempos than the original performance. I do have to fall back to producing a soundtrack by using MIDI synthesis. Slowing down the original score sounds too ugly. If you want to learn to perform or memorize a very fast piece of music, you might wish to have a version available at half or quarter speed or some other slowed down tempo. I can color code the pitches of notes to help the viewer understand what musical materials the composer is using. Harmonic interval coloring marks the pitches of melody notes and notes within chords to signify the distance of that pitch from the root of the accompanying chord. This harmonic interval size measurement can explain to the knowledgeable why a particular pitch has the harmonic effect that it does in a score (how closely it fits the harmony or clashes with it). Melodic interval coloring measures the distance between two succeeding pitches in a melody. These can explain the emotional complexion produced by a melody when it's played without accompaniment. I can easily produce scores for transposing instruments. Transposing instruments cannot play music written for piano or guitar (concert key instruments). Every pitch in a concert score has to move up or down a certain number of steps in the chromatic scale, so that a transposing instrument can play in unison with other instruments. I can change the score for a transposing instrument in an instant and then re-render an animation. I can easily raise or lower the pitches in a score by a uniform amount so that it can be performed by a band in a new key. blog comments powered by Disqus
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Last update: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 9:44 AM. |
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