The comparison is not ideal, because the first clip animates the concerto’s first movement, and the second one animates the third. Also, the first clip features a far better performance than the second, which is obviously the output of a computer playing a programmed version of the score.

Both animations use vertical position to indicate pitch, and scroll horizontally through the score so that the notes currently being played are always in the center of the screen. Both renderings also color-code the individual musical voices. And there the similarities end.

The first animation, which is graphically far more sophisticated, uses colored circles to represent each note, strung along lines that mark off the half-dozen or so separate voices. As each note is struck, it appears as a circle whose initial size indicates the duration of the note. Each circle shrinks at the same rate, so that it has just shrunk to zero by the time the next note is struck. The circles bubble up on the right side of the screen, have their moment in the sun, then rush off to the left — solid before they are struck, and hollow afterwards. The visual effect is lively and effervescent, and in particular the vertically stacked circles that mark off the quarter-note pulse throughout most of the piece have a beautifully propulsive effect. It’s a marvelous piece of work.

The second animation is far simpler, but clearer too: it’s a simple graphic representation of exactly the same sort that one might see on a MIDI display of the score. The notes are horizontal bars, with vertical position representing pitch, and horizontal extension representing duration. As each note plays, it is is highlighted, then goes dark again. That’s it! There’s none of the fancy eye-candy we had in the first clip: the expansion and contraction of the horizontal scale as the circles approach the center, the changing sizes of the circles to represent the lifespan of each note, the passage from solid to hollow circles as each note is played — but the eye is much better able to follow the representation of each note, and to connect the visual input with the music. As much as I admired the creative ingenuity of the first animation, I found the second to be more effective in bringing eye and ear together in a unitary experience.

Have a look. Which do you like better?

(Also: was Bach a genius, or what?)

Oh, and lest we forget: here’s another way of doing this sort of thing.

One evening I put on an album by the seminal jazz ensemble Weather Report, and I could tell the music spoke to her. She listened to the first song with eyes open and a gathering stillness, and by the end of the second piece she had drifted away.

The next night I put on the same album, with the same result. I soon found that this music was the Sandman’s golden key, and I marveled at how it seemed to relax my little Chloë — and how she always fell asleep during that second track. “Like clockwork!” I said to myself.

I wondered what the title of that song was, so I looked at the album jacket. It was called…

…Dream Clock.

The album is Night Passage.

I just listened to it again, after many years, and it brought tears to my eyes. You can hear it yourself here.

When I left New Jersey and headed for Gotham back in the mid-1970′s, I managed to land a job in a top recording studio, and since then I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with many of the world’s best guitarists. But I’ll put John up against any of them.

You tell me. Here’s how John plays the blues. And here’s his version of the immortal Voodoo Chile.

Tom Ardolino just whacked the hell out of the drums, and played the biggest, loudest, fattest grooves you ever heard. What I loved more than anything about his playing was the way he’d find a place somewhere right in between straight four-on-the-floor and a shuffle, and just hammer the crap out of it. Kind of like this.

I always hate it when great musicians die, but this one hurts extra bad. Dammit.

We just posted a couple of NRBQ videos a week or two ago. Go watch ‘em again.

Man, what a band.

On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime comes from a delegation of Neapolitan officials, who inspected the apartment the following day. On the floor of the bedroom, they found the body of Don Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, whom a contemporary described as a “model of beauty,” one of the handsomest young men of his time. The officials’ report stated that the Duke was wearing only “a woman’s nightdress with fringes at the bottom, with ruffs of black silk.” The corpse was “covered with blood and pierced with many wounds,” Lying on the bed was the body of Donna Maria d’Avalos, the famously alluring wife of Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa. Her throat had been cut and her nightshirt was drenched in blood.

Interviews with eyewitnesses left no doubt about who was responsible for the murders. Gesualdo had been seen entering the apartment with three men, shouting, “Kill that scoundrel, along with this harlot!” The report ended with the observation that Gesualdo had left town. A prince being a prince, there matters rested.

Don Carlo Gesualdo was more than just a vengeful prince, however: he was also a composer, as one contemporary observer noted, “of infinite art”. He wrote choral music — madrigals — of a sort that had never been heard before, and the like of which was not heard again until the twentieth century. His compositions, which I had never listened to before last night, seem to occupy two worlds at once: a familiar and beckoning realm of sublime and uplifting harmony, and a strange, alien dimension of unnameable dissonances and constantly shifting keys. Listening to his music is a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory experience; no sooner has the spirit come to rest in a pool of limpid sunlight than the scene shifts, through brief passages of swirling and often terrifying darkness, to the next open glade. The music is never still, and to surrender to it is to be borne away to a dreamlike place of lonely, haunted beauty.

Wikipedia’s article on Gesualdo notes:

The evidence that Gesualdo was tortured by guilt for the remainder of his life is considerable, and he may have given expression to it in his music.

Surely he did. Go to YouTube, search for ‘Gesualdo’, and listen.

I saw Mr. Motian play many times, and had always hoped that I would have a chance to work with him in the studio someday, but never did.

His genius was attentiveness, understatement, nuance, and elegance. There was nobody else like him.

Here he is with his quintet — featuring Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano, Marc Johnson, and Bill Frisell — back in 1995.

HT: Devin Townsend.

Enjoy.

What a voice. What a song. Enjoy.

As one of YouTube’s commenters said: “this is like porn for drummers”.

Older Musicians Experience Less Age-Related Decline in Hearing Abilities Than Non-Musicians

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2011) — A study led by Canadian researchers has found the first evidence that lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians.

While hearing studies have already shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians, this is the first study to examine hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians across the age spectrum — from 18 to 91 years of age.

The study was led by Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and is published online Sept. 13 in the journal Psychology and Aging, ahead of print publication.

Investigators wanted to determine if lifelong musicianship protects against normal hearing decline in later years, specifically for central auditory processing associated with understanding speech. Hearing problems are prevalent in the elderly, who often report having difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Scientists describe this as the “cocktail party problem.” Part of this difficulty is due to an age-related decrease in the ability to detect and discriminate acoustic information from the environment.

“What we found was that being a musician may contribute to better hearing in old age by delaying some of the age-related changes in central auditory processing. This advantage widened considerably for musicians as they got older when compared to similar-aged non-musicians,” said lead investigator Benjamin Rich Zendel at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. Zendel is completing his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Toronto and conducted the study with senior cognitive scientist and assistant director of the Rotman Research Institute, Dr. Claude Alain.

The article doesn’t mention recording engineers, but I’m sure the effect is just as strong for them, if not stronger. Over the years people have often said to me what good hearing I must have to have had a long career as an engineer; I’ve always told them that one doesn’t need exceptional hearing (in fact I had both of my eardrums punctured as a child, to relieve a stubborn middle-ear infection), but must rather be trained to listen. And it seems that training makes a big difference as one’s auditory organs become less sensitive in later years.

They’ve been playing this joint for 31 years.

Dr. John is a walking encyclopedia of the American musical heritage, and probably the foremost living exponent of old-school New Orleans piano-playing. In this video clip, he demonstrates some serious left-hand “trickerations”. Check out those tenths!