For my final project in Barbara Meier’s intermediate animation class, I made a visual interpretation of the first few minutes of of “Knee Play 1" from Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. My aspiration was to transform the music into visible phenomena while retaining its emotion and details: to display every note and syllable as a discrete happening onscreen, in such a way that all the parts together express how the music feels to me.

To convey my sense that this music has meaning that is deep but alien, I used my writing system D16 Syllabics in an abstract cosmic setting. To animate these elements, I first labeled an audio file with all the relevant moments in the music, then used Maya scripting to generate all the layers of animation based on these labels. (This process is shown at the end of the video.)