Remember the days when you’d long to listen to music by the album? You went over to your shelves and looked at the album artwork to find the music you wanted to listen to. With the invention of MP3s and digital music players, the concept of album covers as navigational aids got lost (along with shelves full of records). Suddenly looking for a song meant you had to know the artist, album, or song name. As a visual thinker, I can easily tell you what any album in my music collection looks like from memory, but have a real problem with knowing what album a given song is on.

Continue reading CoverFlow: Better Digital Music Navigation »

Giant Steps by “Michal Levy”:http://michalevy.com/ is a piece of flash animation to the tune of John Coltraine’s _Giant Steps._ It paints a visual picture of the music as each note builds upon the last, creating a striking architectural composition. It was composed as a graduation project for the The academy of Arts and Design, Bezalel.

!http://www.upthetree.com/wp-uploads/giantsteps2.png(Detail still from animation)!

When I listen to music I see colors and shapes and when I watch visual art I hear sounds. I wanted to express my sensing of shapes colors and music in this short movie.

I have chosen a short Jazz piece, which I have known for many years of my playing the saxophone: “Giant Steps” by John Coltraine. Coltraine made a major break through with his album “Giant Steps” in the year 1959. It was the first time in the history of Jazz music that someone based his music on symmetrical patterns, which stemmed from a mathematical division of the musical scale.

The structural approach of John Coltraineto music is associated with architectural thinking. The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space.

“Architecture is crystallized music”. Goethe.

via “DayPop”:http://www.daypop.com/top/