Claude Debussy was a french composer during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Musical culture now labels him as an impressionist, though he despised the term when applied to his music. Like most composers who we remember, he started as a piano prodigy and attended conservatory, but unlike most composers we remember he fought against the system. He battled his professors with unusual dissonances, outrageous chord parallelisms, mixed meters, and music without a “key” center. Where in impressionist art, smudgings and blurs allude to shapes, Debussy’s “impressionist” music alludes to the point, and his use of rhythmic shifting has a way of setting up the audience, and then disappointing them with a minor cadence.

The Music Animation Machine was developed by Stephen Anthony Malinowski. He has done a miraculously good job at documenting, explaining, and allowing his work to be accessible by anyone. The time line of creation for the Music Animation Machine can be found here, you can create your own musical animations by downloading his freeware software and importing your own midi files by going here, and an explanation of why the colors are the way they are can be found here. For more pieces you can purchase DVDs of his Music Animation Machine at high quality, or see his profile on youtube for a large number of works.

In music school, students are trained to hear in both pitch-relations and time-relations – we recognize aural shapes and patterns in beautiful music just as a geologist would recognize subtle changes in sediment below a stream  bed. What the Music Animation Machine has created is a visual representation where non-musicians can hear and see like a musician trains to.