This prototype was made in Virtual Director, and doesn't include any of the modelled landscapes prepared so far, as we don't yet have an easy way to read 3DStudio models. So the landscape here is just a plane, textured with copies of Jack's scanned drawing of the scene.
The modelled music was created from the Quanta.smf MIDI file,
which covers the first portion (maybe a tenth? ~500 beats anyway)
of the composition, for perhaps half the full set of instruments
(54 MIDI tracks). Each MIDI track was mapped to one strip of 3-D notes
across the landscape.
For colors, I used some of those Jack chose -- the ones I happened to have typed in from her color sheets (for violins, violas, cellos), but since there wasn't timbre information in the MIDI file yet, the music colors here were just selected by pitch. The MIDI file did include some pitch-bending information, but since I don't know how to interpret it, I just used whole notes to determine height and color of the music strips.
Rather than breaking the model into tiny fragments and making them move to show the passage of time, I used an OpenGL clipping plane, sweeping smoothly in the timeward direction across the landscape. This let the model itself be completely static, while it appeared to be revealed as the clipping plane moved.
Here's half a dozen frames from the movie:
And, click here for the MPEG animation. It's 8 megabytes (don't try it over a slow modem!), and the motion is pretty ragged, but it shows lots of points of view.
(The Windows MS ActiveMovie 1.0 player claims that MPEGs like this one, exceeding 320 pixels width, are invalid, but it's a lie. ActiveMovie 2.0 fixes that bug; other MPEG players seem to work too.)
Included below are the two perl scripts used to generate the musical models:
dumpmidi, and maketracks. They're used as in
dumpmidi Quanta.smf | maketracks > modelfile
Stuart Levy, slevy@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Last modified Sat Feb 6 16:41:04 CST 1999