psyche

If you were a video editor or small production studio and you wanted to lay down some music on a film, you could use Abaltat’s Muse.

But I see this technology as much more significant than a suggested attempt to put composers on the dole.

Mark Altekruse at Abaltat suggested that as a composer, I could use this to sketch out ideas. He was right: Inside of an hour I was inserting cue points into the timeline and adjusting instrumentation according to color information.

It was a much different composing experience. Instead of writing a piece of music and then plopping it down onto the scene, I could essentially work backwards. By laying down a sketch, I could think about what mood or depth of instrumentation I could use and work out the timing, instead of worrying about the details of the music too early on.

Muse's Color Timeline

The wonderful part is that Muse allows one to export sound files and midi files for placement (exporting cues to AAF files doesn’t seem to be an option yet) and for perfectly reasonable use.Changing the scale of the current composition is quite easy. I could see using Muse on a tight deadline.

What’s most exciting is that Muse is a truly synaesthetic tool for creating dynamic sound from image.