Animating the “Bumbling Bee” Song


I believe that I first encountered Rimsky Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble-Bee” (FOTBB) composition before I began junior-high band in the eighth (8th) grade. I was trying to decide which band instrument I wanted to play. I had been studying piano for several years by this time.

In addition to pianos, there were several instruments in our house: an accordion (I played a little), a saxophone (it smelled bad), and a trumpet. My Mother had played both the trumpet and saxophone during college and during her time teaching school.

I began playing the trumpet and encountered the “Flight of the Bumble-Bee” in a trumpet book of Mother’s. I didn’t continue to play trumpet. And, I never played FOTB again until 2008, when I recorded the piano-solo version.

I recently experienced a “Eureka Moment” in my animation evolution —by learning to use MIDI note information to control aspects of my musical animations in ways that I will continue to explore. As I continue to think about good candidates to demonstrate my recent “Chromatic Pitch Spiral” (CPS), I remembered “Flight of the Bumble-Bee.” It fulfilled several of the characteristics I was seeking for an initial musical selection: single-instrument, polyphonic (multiple notes at the same time), and is something that could “showcase” the usage of my Spiral.

I hope that you enjoy my presentation —and, stay tuned !!!

The Olympic Chromatic Pitch Spiral


I’ve searched for the “hidden secret” to/of music theory, chord-construction, and the selection and arrangement of pitched “notes” for most of my life. I laugh to myself that I have been on a lifelong quest in search of the “Lost Chord.”

Music is used to accompany video more often than vice versa. For more than a decade, I have sought ways to use video to accompany the music I produce —to enhance the likelihood that the audience I seek will be sufficiently immersed to listen to my musical performances.

Pitch Class VisualizationLike hour-divisions on a clock, there are 12 chromatic pitches per octave. All of music can be reduced to that —twelve (12) different pitches —one revolution around a traditional “pitch wheel.” Students of music-theory know the “Circle of Fifths,” which is an arranged ordering of a “pitch wheel.”

I’m celebrating that with study and practice over an extended period of time, I have learned to use MIDI notes and timing-data to control aspects of my animations. In this case, I am turning ON and OFF the display of the previously-created wedges that I call “pie pieces,” and that represent the twelve (12) distinct notes/tones of a/the “chromatic” (musical) scale.

This project exists at the intersection of my continued experiments to bridge music with its theory and its performance —using visual elements as accompaniment.

One complete revolution around the spiral represents an octave. My spiral instrument represents a set of chromatic pitches that, if you consider the lowest RED, center-most pitch (“pie-wedge“) in the picture to be C1, which is the lowest C on a piano, then pitches ascend to C8, the highest C on a piano and also the highest note on a piano. The spiral’s pitches extend downward to the C#/Db a semitone above what would be C0 on a piano, if that note existed on a piano (it does not).

This is the 1st of something new for me—and, I can’t wait to share what I have in mind. I’ll save additional technical details for later —except, to say that I used Python scripting in the Blender 3D app on MacOS to accomplish the input and processing of a (one of my) MIDI file’s data, saved as “.csv” (comma-separated-values) using Cycling 74’s Max app, and then used the input CSV data to create display-status key-frames for the “pie pieces” in Blender.

The 2024 Paris Olympic Games ended recently. Few of us will become physically skilled as those who competed in Paris in 2024. This bespoke animation is synchronized to my arrangement of the Olympic Fanfare theme-music, and is my tribute to those of us who continue with deliberate effort, working and practicing to perfect our particular skills and crafts.

Practice for OUR Olympics continues —and NEVER ends.

Spinning Tops Video

I have begun learning video-editing using Blender 3D —supplementing the 3D modeling that I have done using Blender. This is the second “ForeverSpin™ spinning-top video” I made as a learning exercise last year.

In addition to bronze and platinum ForeverSpin tops, this video uses three (3) iPhones (6, 12, and 14), and also a bike-cam. All of the cameras were on stationary-overhead arm-mounts. You can see these at the beginning of the movie on the “footage” taken by the bike-cam. I make brief appearances at the beginning and ending of the video —to spin the tops and to then hopefully mostly disappear —until the end, when I reappear to stop the cameras one by one.

In the Blender 3D app I learned:

  1. To align three (3), and then four (4) video files using their audio track’s visual waveforms to synchronize the videos.
  2. To switch between camera views.
  3. To mask-out unwanted portions of a video, though I did no masking in the accompanying video.
  4. To shift and scale video from its original format.
  5. To render the resultant composite-videos and audio into a “proper” and as-small-as-needed streaming format, which is important for sharing a project such as this.

Finally, a couple of less “technical” lessons I learned were:

  1. Don’t let the cameras take pictures of each other.
  2. Stay out of the picture.

The accompanying music is “Arubian Nights,” one of the sketches/compositions from my 1998 production, “Girl Songs And Other Sketches.” I selected this particular piece because its length fit “just right.”

I hope that you enjoy.