Monday 30 January 2012

Plans for 2012

Almost 1/12 of the new year 2012 has already passed... The Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra (VPO) has big projects for this year: all pre-2005 renditions will be re-recorded, using Garritan Personal Orchestra 4, and all these new recordings will have completely new expression and timing mapping. Also, some of the music excerpts from suites/symphonies which are currently only available in a subset of movements, will be completed, so that these work are no longer there in isolation.

But there are also plans for new renditions, and this weekend I started working on one: although the Mahler year is over, I have begun to record the first movement of Symphony #2. Got already the first minute or so. Now this is a big one, and I am already dreading how to work on the huge final movement (which requires a choir and two orchestras...). Also the first movement requires quite an orchestral setup. In Sonar, I did create 4 sets of ARIA players, with a total of 64 different orchestra instrument samples. This appears to reach the limit of my PC: the audio play is a bit choppy, although only few instruments are playing during this first minute. However, the off-line "bounce-to-track" seemed to work without glitches, so I will carry on. In the 2nd minute there is a large "unisono" which will use most of the instruments simultaneously - if I get this working ok, then the rest should be fine.

You may wonder what this image to the top left is: this is a glimpse into results of my recent work on automatic music visualization. The algorithm takes into account periodicities in music and is based on a 2D Fourier Transform. More will be in a paper which I am currently preparing. This snapshot is a visualization of a moment in Smetana's Moldau.