Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 (2009)

Recently I took a few months of my free time and decided to recreate Arnold Schoenberg's 1909 op. 11 Drei Klavierstücke (aka Three Piano Pieces) by editing together videos of cats playing pianos downloaded from Youtube. Schoenberg's Op11 is often considered the first piece of "atonal" music, or music to completely break from traditional western harmony which means it's not written in a "key". Below you will find the three videos (one for each piano piece), a technical description & the score.

This project fuses a few different things I have been interested in lately, mainly "cats", copy & paste net junk, and youtube's tendency in the past few years to host videos that are as good and many times similar to my favorite video artworks. I think all this is somehow related. I'm talking about The Infinite Cat Project, Cats in Sinks, Cat in Fan, Ninja cat comes closer while not moving!, Smart Cat Open Door, Fat Cat VS Small Box, Pussy versus Printer, Edison's The Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton's), It's been a long day, Panta improvising on the piano featuring my cat (my personal favorite cat video), the Ultimate Canon Rock, Sopranos every profanity, The Big Lebowski - Every Single Fucking Dude, Marclay's "hello" supercut, 50 50s, Check out my new stereo - Extreme Bass! (also see Goldstein's "A Glass of Milk" here), Watching the Paint Dry (also see Burt Barr's Watching The Paint Dry series here), even Andy Eating a Hamburger, & Infinite Warhol (you might have noticed we are back 2 the beginning of this list).

Anyway, somehow I ended up with the three videos below. Enjoy.

I.

II.

III.

Technical Info

So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos. Then I extracted the audio from each, pasted these files end to end, and then pasted this huge file onto the end of an audio file of Glenn Gould playing op11. I loaded this file into Comparisonics. Comparisonics, a strange free program I found while surfing one night, allows users to highlight a section of audio, and responds by finding "similar" sounding areas in rest of the audio file. Using Comparisioncs I went through every "note" (sometimes I also did clusters of notes) in the Gould, then selected my favorite "similar" section Comparisonics suggested and wrote it in the score. After going though the 1000's of "notes", the completed scores were turned into a video by some perl scripts I wrote which are available here if you wanna do something similar.

For those out there in Internet land wondering how close cats could actually come to Gould playing Schoenberg, in the below mp3, I have placed my cats in the left channel and Gould in the right channel. Listen with headphones. It's not so far off I think.

Score

The file format is: youtube filehash - comma - sample number at 44100 samples per second where the in point of video is - comma - sample number at 44100 samples per second of the clip length. In this pdf here I have provided the key as to which youtube files line up with what notes in Schoenberg. The Schoenberg score has line numbers written below its notes which correspond to the line numbers from the 3 score txt files below.

• Score for op11 - I
• Score for op11 - II
• Score for op11 - III

Thanks

Thanks 2 Spleenless Mastering who masted the final audio. Also Joe 4 help with number III. Also thanks for Film and Video Umbrella, who commissioned an earlier version of this concept. And special thanks to the following youtube files: -8-S1dwcvzw, 73XYgU86aww, H9tIWwFPAcg, TOSs-GYcGgk, eDN_xKLhfXc, ryyvfjMHRGg, -BYKoAydfKk, 78V3nblykiU, HEhoLwc15M4, TcEm8x6zLvA, eDSZgOZmEoo, s9i_GqMIY30, -QIVEkY0CuY, 7G4z8UQItSQ, HK4XAXLUics, TcsBghT2cNQ, emP5sRCVwSI, sWlcyPuWM9Y, -VFmqcB9UYQ, 8OTADd1THKU, HM-1VzJUejw, ThOetAkUWRw, f7aZjVsl_jQ, scwRUGgv9Jw, -gzV983BqNE, 8wG4gGW8pAs, HRTd6cPiM1A, TvuAzIUnGtg, fLOYZpQoSCo, t4VNx9R8eEM, -lafzKEMpuM, 8yQTF3EUKuo, Hdqhprr03bY, UDtidPbpWG4, g8PWYsOoZy8, tLo9TZKW85I, 000dCcclXpE, 95wb8pW9EaY, HwmtFQoGrfk, V2GkSR-Tc4E, gc-YZi33myA, tR3XUKgOHVY, 0G2dd2nNixE, 98bTekFgKGY, Js-1svTlMHI, WWkE2i-6ekI, gnbmN8js708, tYn9OHKlwoo, 0ywiSuCDiOM, 9ATv4DSkKZs, JsQds6T-JUo, WfsMaen6QBI, hnng9ni-ws8, tvkuiJ_5e_Y, 1RJnwbCR9l4, 9FMvf9lyiBA, LWBDFG09XoA, XSiSzn3OchU, iRfT0WfnWIU, uCPVEuFdq1I, 1XFKIZfdXVQ, 9PrHZAhTrro, LqBpEnlAcZo, XyuXvWouDEk, jg6rfcRzQGQ, uQc8SeJ3z9c, 1YK7DCQOqz8, 9T6zVQzmSsI, M9SwMFWECMs, Y1cAO08EYLg, kL0m3NhVlWY, vAQVJEu6fNc, 1n8vybiPn0I, A8yvYC0HthM, M_SaeCYglqQ, YLWd_eXQ29E, kPyj1JG3QHw, vCJpTR-ugyM, 2COuDGUX-cU, BKtdYzHyx6M, NFtO2fFdSRY, YW7U8B0qRXg, kj2TDKU2aAg, vuO0xYdyMO4, 2DcHBjQaSOQ, Bf9Xi4iqeL0, OO-6kwBy_s0, YpVKn9TnM10, lYgITLbVwC4, wK8GE4ZZQiA, 2QfzC3pgV0Q, BgF56KQ8ldU, Oaz8Qo2OHVY, Z86Fx--Qgwc, mmTQcmpfI-k, wNt1Or0fQC4, 2VgGVxcALoc, DBCpRUQxAwU, OgmXR7k__WU, Z9BTkX00HeY, mtxlyXRGWvw, xnqb6XPDGA8, 32F3ycxNIuk, DOebEX8PukU, P87zxptEo0Q, ZeMxIH2Ozeg, n01P1v7WEz0, xqxr5TYIqgQ, 3r8NTt7RYzQ, Di7TOsj_H0g, PlME0VQDRuo, Zg6yqtq3FVE, neZNdOnf7RY, xvsv6R4b_bE, 45YA4KefHVM, DwX_Wih97WA, PrsFZT_1NAk, ZqTnGQit7nA, ngy0PCtNd0k, yb2NiCv3Xd0, 5JoIPH7BRLA, E3UGUAF8pjA, Q8VmKyVY-Pc, _2XLyEANzCM, nmqXM51Ey9M, yqpNlbhxsvM, 5KWaA34gWiA, EhD4IwX7uSg, QM0hNBftUDs, a5M515QZMYM, o4YhebTk0VM, yuMeEDfzz5k, 5hEu5aThNI8, Ehl1lpSxPnw, Qso9n2n2Ga8, aJEjduT2QZA, oXb9RmrThu4, z0q6HUWZdPc, 66FF3JN_9PE, EtN4Gom_ZPE, QvZIFUgd9iY, aMKIpAl5lC0, pi8dkqpTesY, zEG9RcVE6FE, 6DvE0i0B9-8, F6--wZ7gQpQ, SF4JC5DdN3E, ayvU-PrD0z4, pvt5fpgYPeI, zfc_69UHQNI, 6Nca4KVzSDk, F6ZxE63Hb1o, SL9FE0cWThQ, b9sxmVlif1k, qP9PAF_7HAI, 6U7jxeV06Js, GGFJiNTFWEg, S_7WXkmx1f8, cEvjChxwIZw, qTovWzCak5M, 6cRnujTrUH4, GxI3tl85wbM, SpJUj626qCc, cttKu6xQSzg, r-cmz6-MgHw, 6stIerPNNic, H8uVR8M8_D8, TAfEj43gI5U, eAlhMoxHOpc, r70-dpbP8z8