Doctor Karaoke #4: An Animated Wordle

It was probably inevitable that as I look for varied ways to create video karaoke for Doctor in Spite of Himself tunes, I'd find my way back to two of my favorite summer discoveries: kinetic typography and Wordles. Technically, what you see below isn't a Wordle, but its look is certainly inspired by those colorful word pictures - especially in the way that words are scattered across the canvas. It also isn't nearly as animated as some of the better kinetic typographimations out there, but I did borrow from that words-as-characters sort of look. The inspiration here comes directly from the vividly angular impact of Martine's vengeance aria, "Women Everywhere." As I describe over on the Doctor Blog, Gounod portrays the wronged wife's emotional outbursts with wide, angry leaps that are countered by tender, sobbing chromatic lines.

In order to show how pitch range is used to bring Martine's inner life to life, I decided to plot the words vertically in a way that literally shows the intervals at play. Thus, the karaoke becomes a sort of visual listening guide (a pet topic of mine), which is just as well since it's harder to sing than the average karaoke subject. The effect is intentionally unpredictable and a little frightening - which seems to be Gounod's conception of Martine!



Also note that the audio and video for Karaoke #3 have been improved.