The long awaited sequel to Animusic has arrived on DVD. What a cool marriage of music and computer graphics, if you like that kind of thing. It isn’t quite Pixar, well, maybe it’s what Pixar used to be in the 1980s with their animated shorts featured at animation festivals. The Animusic people’s emphasis is music played by animated instruments but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Normally in animation, the music is recorded and then the animation is drawn or rendered “around” it, same way voice-over parts are done for cartoons. “Well, duh!” you’d say because we’ve all seen those making-of features on the Disney cartoon DVDs. The Animusic people do it the other way around by composing the music, feeding it through MIDI instructions to the computer and the “instruments” play the notes. Again, much like Pixar, Animusic is a software company too and the DVD is a demonstration of their product. The Animusic product is prebuilt, computerized and animated instruments that are consistent in matching the notes with how the instrument would operate in real life. For example, in a standard cartoon, some character is playing the guitar. It’s pretty unlikely the strumming and finger positions on the frets are correct, accurate and most importantly always in the same position for the same note. Doesn’t really matter anyway. With an Animusic feature, the B flat note the pogo-stick guitar plays is constantly generated from the same position with its “fingers.”
Now that I’ve covered the technical merits, how is this stuff? It’s pretty amazing and hypnotic. Especially the sequel to their most famous piece Pipe Dream shown on PBS and the now defunct Tech TV. If you’ve never seen the first Pipe Dream, it’s a song where all the notes are caused by ball bearings shooting out of tubes at various angles to strike either strings, drums, percussion instruments, chimes, bells and a vibraphone (or is it a xylophone). After the ball bearing has struck, it then lands into a receiving tube. The timing, the coordination, the physics and the lighting are all impressive, even if you don’t like the music. Pipe Dream 2 continues the wonder but the Animusic crew have put a little more wear on the drums to make it look more realistic. There’s a starship with a band of robots, there’s a gathering of pogo-stick based instruments jamming while they travel over a series of planks, there’s a temple that has various light beams project from it to illustrate its song and much more. If it I haven’t piqued your curiosity by now, then I doubt you’ll check out the free clips here.
I wonder if there will ever be a solution from Animusic to combine it with Logic or GarageBand?