You can now animate your music using MIDI files!
If you’re a fan of classical music, chances are that you’ve stumbled upon a YouTube channel called “smalin” owned by Stephen Malinowski. Stephen’s channel is known for its beautiful visualisations of musical pieces and he’s basically a pioneer of colourful geometric musical animations. Being a composer and software engineer, making an open source software inspired by Stephen’s animations plagued my mind.
My idea was to make an accessible, customisable and flexible software. I decided to make it open source for the sole reason that I wanted more people to try their hands on making their own themes and sharing them with the community.
After a month of coding day in and day out, “Maestoso” finally happened! Maestoso lets you create stunning 2D Animations directly from MIDI files. It currently features 7 customizable themes pertaining to 4 seperate categories of musical information: Rhythm, Harmony, Melody and Polyphony. This software also offers in-built methods that make retrieval of MIDI information easy and straightforward, making it easy for contributors to solely focus on theme construction.
You can download the software from www.maestoso.org and alternatively you can pull the source code from github: https://github.com/amanatron/Maestoso
MAESTOSO 2.0 COMING SOON!
Some of the features currently being developed for Maestoso 2.0:
- Give the users more power with themes by letting them design the themes themeselves without having to write a single line of code
- Methods that tackle ornamentations and articulations more accurately and creatively
- Support for lyrics: bind text to other musical features and have more control
- Advanced harmonic analysis and manipulations: retrieve information specific to chord functions and provide methods to manipulate animations to them
- Support for different musical forms: support for musical forms such as fugues, raps and etc where their distinctive stylistic traits are better highlighted, i.e, rhyme scheme analysis, melodic transformations and etc can be better animated.
