Rune:
You're right, the illusion isn't as good as it could be. The vertical
movement of the sticks is controlled by the equation e^-abs(time-timeofhit),
which is a fairly rough-and-ready approximation to the movement of human
playing. One reason I kept things fairly slow was that I feared that without
motion blur, it might look as though the beaters never hit the bars at all.
Another thing which might improve it is a slight movement of the bars when
each beater hits.

Flu:
Animusic was my inspiration for this :) - see the thread in
povray.animations. I've only seen "Pipe Dream" in full, where its quite
clear what's being hit because everything moves with fairly exaggerated
motions when hit. The only place where the effect falls down slightly, in my
opinion, is with the bongos on the stringed instruments and the snare drum.
Both of these have a very 'tight' sound, yet the balls fall on them quite
slowly. This comes back to Rune's point about the timbre of the sounds not
quite matching the animation.

If you'd like, I'll send you my MIDI reading code - not a very elegant
implementation, but if you, like I, can only find cryptic file format
descriptions on the web it might be of use?

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