2001 was a pretty big year for computer
animation. Pixar put out their fourth movie, Monsters Inc (their highest grossing film
at the time) and Dreamworks released Shrek, the cultural icon of a generation which would
influence memes, art, and electoral politics for the next two decades. Beneath the scuffle of
the two industry giants though, that same year a much smaller studio would release their first
“Computer Animation Video Album:” Animusic. Now, as far as I can tell, even if most
people don’t remember Animusic by name, they’ve probably at least seen it at some point,
whether it was on YouTube, or a PBS pledge drive, or even just music class at school. For those who
aren’t familiar with the concept though, Animusic is an album of seven short computer animated
films, each set to its own piece of music. Each animation features a group of instruments
with the idea that the instruments in the animation are playing the music that you hear.
One way I’ve heard it described is as a “Virtual Concert,” except in the Animusic world, there
aren’t any people playing the instruments. Instead, you’ll see things
like a robotic rock band, magical floating guitar picks, sci-fi musical lasers, or a series of pipes firing
metal balls at a drumset. There’s a lot of real creativity in this
album, and no two tracks feel alike. Pair that with the graphical quality of the
animations (which have aged pretty gracefully for something 20 years old now), and you might
be surprised to learn that this whole half hour long video album is the work of just two guys:
Wayne Lytle, and David Crognale. It probably wouldn’t have been possible had they not had
one little technological trick up their sleeves. When it comes to computer animation, the way
things usually work is that you enter in what are known as key-frames. The idea is that we set
the position of a moving object at a few points in time, and the computer will fill in the rest of
the motion with a smooth path between the points. In general, this makes most animation work a whole
lot easier, since most of the motion frames can be generated automatically, but for a music animation
like Animusic, where multiple instruments are playing multiple notes per second, there’s a lot
of tedious work syncing up keyframes to each note. But here’s the cool little trick with
animusic: the music you hear in the animations isn’t actually a recording of people
playing the songs on instruments in a studio. Instead, every instrument is a
synthesizer playing a MIDI file, the digital equivalent of sheet music. MIDI files
don’t actually record the sounds of a performance, just which notes need to be played
at which time to reproduce the song. Most of the time, MIDI is used to write music,
since a composer can write down a song once, and then do things like play with the
instrumentation of tempo without actually having to re-record the song. What Wayne Lytle
had figured out though, was that you could take the same MIDI information that was going to the
synthesizer to generate the music, and through a little piece of software called MIDIMotion,
feed that data into the animation as well. Since a MIDI file says when every note in the
song is played, it’s really easy to generate all the keyframes to make the virtual instruments
“play” at exactly the right moment. In a sense, once the music is written and the instruments
are built, they basically animate themselves. All of this technically impressive process
was completely lost on me as a kid, but at the end of the day, it didn’t really
matter anyway. I actually remember the day I first saw animusic. My dad bought the DVD on
a PBS pledge drive thinking I might like it, and when we both watched it together
before school one day, my mind was blown. I had never seen something so cool in my
life. My favorite track was Pipe Dream, the one with the bouncing metal balls, and from
what I can tell, I wasn’t alone. In fact, this video got so popular at the time, there was a hoax
email spreading around claiming that the animation was actually footage of a real machine built
by the University of Iowa out of tractor parts. Obviously now, that’s a lie, but at the time,
this quality animation and lowres online video made it at least a little believable. Real
or not though, I was hooked on Animusic. After the Animusic DVDs initial release in
2001, Animusic 2 soon entered production, and when I found out about it, I was hyped.
The DVD we had included a teaser trailer, and the animusic website at the time hosted a few
short clips of the eight animations. That’s right, eight. Not seven like the first album. This
one had eight brand new animations, and I could not wait to see them all. In 2005,
Animusic 2 was available to buy on DVD. Animusic 2 in many ways is a huge step up from the
first album, in terms of visual design, graphical quality, and the amount of content on the DVD, but
it also isn’t afraid to call back to things that worked well in the first album. Take, for example,
the sequel to Pipe Dream: Pipe Dream 2. This track in particular shows how powerful the MIDIMotion
engine was in terms of making animations. Entire instruments could be re-used. Just put a
new piece of music through the animation system, change a few smaller details like lighting and
cameras, and you now have a totally new animation. There are other callbacks to the first
DVD too. The track, Pogo Sticks takes the character from Stick Figures, nicknamed Mr.
Stick by some fans, and builds a whole band of these guitar-robot hybrids, with wheels
so that they can roll around the stage. Animusic 2 actually has a few
animations this time with more humanoid-looking robots, like the three
sets of drummer arms from Gyro Drums, and the 5 piece space-robot band in
the opening track Starship Groove. The album also leans a lot more into the synthey,
sci-fi type of animations than its predecessor, with almost half the album set either in
space, in a space-ship, or on an alien planet. At the same time though, I think some of the
best acoustic work of either of the two albums also happens here in Resonant Chamber, which
features a weird, creepy crab-leg guitar thing. The Animusic team even tried
adapting a classical piece, “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky. I love both of the Animusic albums, but I
do think it’s fair to say that Animusic 2 is a step up from Animusic 1. It’s clear that the
artistic duo behind it recognized the things that people liked from their first project, and built
on them in ways that didn’t feel too derivative. The album takes all the fun from the first
Animusic, and just ups the excitement. After seeing how Animusic 2 improved on Animusic 1, I
and many others at the time, got really excited to imagine what Animusic 3 might have in store.
Before we talk about Animusic 3 though, I do want to back up a bit and talk about
how the whole Animusic concept got developed. By the time the first album was released, it
had been an idea nearly 20 years in the making. Wayne Lytle himself claims to have come up
with the idea for computerized music and animation synchronization all the way back in
his undergraduate years in the early eighties. At the time he was studying at the West Chester
University of Pennsylvania for a music major, when he developed an interest in computer
science. A few years later he would move on to do a masters in computer graphics at
Cornell, before ultimately ending up working to produce data visualization animations
for scientists at the Cornell Theory Center. As a big fan of Mr Lytles work, it’s really cool
to take a look at some of the animation projects he worked on at this time, most of which have
recently been made accessible on YouTube thanks to the work of the Animusic Archival Project.
Obviously none of these animations are of musical instruments, but there are certainly
little glimpses of the animusic albums, even at this point. For one, Wayne Lytle composed
most of the music used in these short films, which has his own specific sound, but even some
features of the animations, like the themes of outer space and astrophysics do seem a bit more
relevant when you see the artistic direction some of the animusic animations took. The most
relevant piece of work at this time though, was a little two minute animation made
for fun, called More Bells and Whistles. Released in 1990, More Bells and Whistles is
the first animation I’ve been able to find that applied the ideas of MIDI-driven animation.
In other words, the very first Animusic song. And from what I can tell, at least within
the computer graphics community at the time, it was a big hit. What I find the most interesting
about this animation in particular is that, even at the very beginning, a lot of the ideas that
would become Animusic staples were already there, like magical floating drumsticks that do flips,
musical lasers to visualize the electronic sounds… heck, even the musical fountain later seen in
Pipe Dream has its roots in this animation. Over the next few years Lytle would continue
his work making scientific visualizations, but it was clear he liked the direction
More Bells and Whistles had gone. Five years after that animation came out, he
would officially found the company Animusic, and one more year after that, the
company had their first customer: Vrex, the makers of special 3D glasses
for use with a personal computer or TV. Animusic’s first project as a company was
to make a demo animation for the product, and they ended up producing “Concerto in
3D,” also known as “Beyond the Walls.” Now, knowing that this was made to be viewed
with 3D glasses, it’s not a huge surprise that there are a lot of things sticking right out at
the camera, like a bubble blower and stretchy horns. Still this animation is certainly
a visual step up from the first project. It has these two little drum dudes, the
first anthropomorphic Animusic characters, and also this cymbal helicopter,
which is probably my favorite part. Around this time, Dave had joined the Animusic
team, and Wayne Lytle would leave his job at Cornell to work on the first Animusic album
full-time. This ended up taking about 3 years, and as mentioned before, it was released in
2001. Not long after that, work started on the second album in 2002, and again, three
years later in 2005, it would be released. As a little sidenote, there were two really
short animations produced between the two DVD albums in 2002. The band Kansas commissioned the
Animusic company to animate sections of their live performance Device Voice Drum for its home release
on DVD. The animations are certainly more deep-cut animusic content, but you can still find them
online. They don’t feature many new instruments though, instead, it’s mostly instruments
from Animusic 1 put together into a new band. Anyways, I talked about Animusic 1,
Animusic 2, all the pre-animusic content, what about Animusic 3? Well,
not unlike the Half Life series, Animusic 3 still hasn't been released.
But, that’s jumping ahead a little bit. By the time Animusic 2 had been completed in 2005
it was essentially tradition that each animusic project was produced on better software than
the one before it. So, before work started on Animusic 3, a lot of time was put into modernizing
the in-house software, called Animusic Studio, to be faster, more powerful, and easier to
use. This process took a few years to do, but by early 2007, there was already some talk
on the Animusic website regarding details of the Animusic 3 project. At the time, there were 8
animations planned, including one by the name of “Super Pipe Dream,” but past that, there wasn’t
a whole lot of information publicly available. In 2009, there was a little bit of activity from
the company to announce the HD animusic rerelease on bluray, plus a quick mention of Animusic 3 and
some early concept art. Animusic 3 was planned to be released in mid-2010 though that year would
come and go. The project returned to silence for another few years, though as it turned
out, this would be the calm before the storm. In August of 2012, Animusic announced the
launch of a one month $200,000 Kickstarter campaign to finish the Animusic 3 DVD by the end
of the following year. So said their video post, the company had spent most of their resources in
developing the new version of Animusic studio, and they needed a bit more money to buy the
equipment necessary to make Animusic 3 happen. Backers who paid enough were essentially
pre-ordering their Animusic 3 DVDs and CDs, alongside other perks like t-shirts. The
announcement also featured more exciting news: Animusic 3 would have 12 tracks, 3 of which
were available to listen to on Soundcloud. Looking back, it was a pretty tense month
watching the Kickstarter project slowly creep towards its goal. I remember
checking up on it every day to see how likely my chances of seeing Animusic
3 would be. To make a long story short, not only did Animusic meet their $200K goal, they
surpassed it by $23,136 with over 3,200 donations, making it the #2 highest funded animation
project on all of Kickstarter at the time. Things were looking good for the project, and it
seriously felt like after years of waiting, we might finally see Animusic 3 released in October
of 2013. That is, until that date came and went. Yeah, after that point, information coming
out of Animusic once again came to a bit of a standstill, and it wouldn’t be until 2014
that another public announcement would be made. Eventually, by early 2015, almost three years
after the funding goal had been reached, Wayne Lyle announced the completion of
the 12 piece soundtrack to Animusic 3, and began to ship out CDs and T-Shirts
to the backers that had requested them. Not long after, the final update on the project,
ominously titled “Alive” would be posted. In the post, Wayne described how he and Dave
decided after nearly 20 years of working together on Animusic, that it would be best for Dave
to leave the project and move onto other work. This was because, while Dave had been producing
models for many of the animations in Animusic 3, Wayne hadn’t been able to keep up with his work,
meaning that Dave often didn’t have much to do. Wayne also described how health issues, including
Bell’s Palsy, ADHD, depression and repetitive stress injuries had made it significantly
more difficult for him to continue his work on Animusic 3, especially considering
that he was now working mostly on his own. Despite these setbacks, Wayne Lytle ended the
message still determined to complete the project. Since then, 5 years have passed without another
update. Currently, it appears the Animusic office has been sold to another company, and while
the Animusic website has been redesigned, not much else has come out about the
project beyond the occasional rumor. I really, really wanted to see Animusic 3.
I still do, actually. And let me tell you, few things are more disappointing than getting
invested in a creator, getting really excited to see what they’ll do next, only for them to
drop off the face of the Earth. (uh, by the way, sorry about that) At this point, I’m pretty sure
I won’t see an official Animusic 3 in my lifetime, but you know what? I’m ok with that. The
first two DVDs were pretty good on their own. It’d be nice to have a third, but that
doesn’t take away from what we already have. And besides, if I wanted more Animusic
content, there are alternatives... Animusic has inspired TONS of people.
Don’t believe me? Just check out YouTube, or the Animusic subreddit. Even now people are
uploading fanart, covers of Animusic songs, memes, a Pipe Dream remake in Minecraft, and my personal favorite: the fan animations. There are so many of these, one
playlist counts well over 400, some going all the way back
to the early days of YouTube. And yeah, that’s right, there’s
even a Pipe Dream rickroll video. The quality on some of these videos is so
high, it honestly feels like they could have been tracks out of Animusic 3, and
as far as I’m concerned, they all are. As always, I’ll include the links to
these videos in the description and I’d highly recommend watching them in full.
There’s also one other teeny tiny thing that’s probably relevant. Remember pipe dream?: fan
favorite of the first album, subject of an email hoax claiming it was real? Yeah, well, a couple
people actually did make it real. Back in 2010, Intel made a version of the instruments which
were played via little rubber ball launchers. It’s kinda fun, but really it’s just a little
machine programmed to sync up to an audio track. In 2016 though, a certain video dropped.
A certain VIRAL 180 million view video. The band Wintergatan built what they call
the “Marble Machine” a giant, wooden, hand-cranked contraption that actually plays music
by launching metal balls onto the instruments. After 30 years this concept was able to break
its way out of the computer animation world, and into the physical. Now, I can’t confirm that Pipe
Dream was the direct inspiration for this machine, but it’s clear the band is aware of
it, and I personally believe that in a world where Animusic had never existed,
we would never have seen this video either. Animusic is just one of those things that
has just stuck with me all this time. From when I first heard it as a little kid
to me making this video over 15 years later. I don’t think I’ve ever “grown out of it” and I
kinda doubt I ever will. The concept is just so creative, there genuinely isn’t anything quite
like it. And the level of detail in all of these animations does not go unappreciated. Wayne
and Dave were able to squeeze so much energy, and fun into these two albums, and I’m
really glad to have been introduced to them.
