Courtesy of the Music Animation Machine. Best watched in full screen. A few observations:

1. I can’t even begin to decipher musical notation.

This animation told me a lot more about the structure of the first movement of the Fifth in real time than I think I would have learned in hours poring over the sheet music, or even through listening again and again to the symphony itself.

Not everything – I don’t know how you could graphically represent time signature, for example. But enough.

2. If this animation was converted into an augmented reality iPhone app, for use by concertgoers during performances – if you could understand what was going on in the latest avant-garde work in the moment, or you could overlay the interpretations that had been made of one symphony by different orchestras – well, that would be really cool.

3. It looks a bit like the Arecibo message, and even a bit reminiscent of the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is pleasing.