SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  9/4/08; 11:04:09 PM Msg#:  5522 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  5521/5523 Reads:  150479

Sonny Rollins' 78th Birthday Page

It's here. When you follow the link and press the play button, you'll see a Flash animation that I contributed to the celebration.

Kudos to Bret Primack, the Jazz Video Guy, for doing such great work on this presentation. I was honored to have been a part of it.

This is the first public presentation of software technology for score animations that I've worked on since early July .If you visit here often, I'm sure you noticed I didn't post much this summer. This was why.

The solo transcription that's animated for the Birthday celebration page, The Everywhere Calypso, shows how one of Sonny's greatest solos goes. My friend Jack, who recommended this to me in 1977 five years after it was first released, told me it was like hearing Bach improvise a calypso, and that Sonny was playing with immense authority.

Since I've heard it, I've always thought that the A side of  Sonny Rollins' Next Album with The Everywhere Calypso, Keep Hold Of Yourself and Skylark was a perfect jazz album side,  like Coltrane's Crescent album, with Crescent, Wise One and Bessie's Blues.

The coolest thing about this is that the animation doesn't use a synthesized MIDI track to perform the solo. Instead, I used the MIDI synthesis to verify that the transcription was correct, threw that away, and then used the original recording of Sonny's solo as the animation soundtrack.

Here's the high level description for Sonny's guests that tells how it was made.

And here are the gritty production details if you'd like to see the actual production recipe.

Transcriptions always leave so much  out. Everything's in this animation.

A transcription is an abstraction that necessarily leaves out an incredible information about a piece of music. In this animation, all of Sonny's expression is there to be heard, so whatever the notation leaves out is still there in the recording. The notated solo becomes an index that lets you reach into the piece and find any part of the music that you'd like to listen to.

If you are fanatical to learn about music as I am, you might enjoy this and discover its value. I'd love to see many other great pieces of music get this treatment.

Such animations can graphically present information that students find is difficult to derive for themselves. The notes in this solo animation are color coded to show why each note sounds the way it does against the tune's chord accompaniment.

Using the SongTrellis Music Editor, it's very easy to produce other kinds of animations  that color code the kinds of melodic jumps a soloist or composer uses moment-by-moment in a piece, or that color code exactly what pitch is supposed to play for each note.

If a student's notation reading is shaky, as mine was for years after I started to try to read scores, having these kinds of thing available would have increased my reading proficiency tremendously. I was mostly self-taught. It took a lot of time to figure out how accidental marks added to notes interacted with the notation's key signature.

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