From the Desk of David Pogue

One bummer about growing older is that you don't feel a sense of wonder very often. When you're a kid, everything is new, so you're blown away all the time. But as your life experience grows, you feel those rushes of wonder less and less frequently.

A few weeks ago, though, I encountered a piece of high-tech art that's unlike anything that's come before. It's a DVD called Animusic. Its blend of music, visuals, humor and science is so new and so brilliant, it triggered feelings of fascination, laughter, amazement--and, yes, wonder.

And I'm not alone. When my wife and I played this DVD for guests and relatives over Thanksgiving, everyone was suddenly talking and exclaiming. Our elementary-schoolers have watched it repeatedly, announcing when the good parts are coming. And our 14-month-old baby dances, stomps and twirls, waggling his hands in the air, possessed by the purest response of all.

So what is Animusic? It's hard to describe, of course, because it's not like anything else--that's the whole point. But this much is safe to say: it's a DVD of music videos--computer-generated, photorealistic animation (think Pixar).

There are no people or animals, and there's no dialogue or even singing; instead, you see fantastic, fanciful, gleaming, futuristic, alien instruments being played either by robots, pulsing lasers or by themselves. In "Resonant Chamber," delicate, birdlike robotic pluckers play a guitar with nine necks; in "Pipe Dream," a favorite of Animusic fans, various string and percussion instruments are struck by balls fired from pipe cannons with impeccable timing; in "Pogo Sticks," a family of self-plucking, two-string, bodyless bass-like instruments balance on one wheel as they cruise and boogie through a 3-D, tunneled landscape.

The core idea is entirely new, but the spices include "Metropolis," "Alien," video games, Disney World, laser shows, Spielberg, MTV, Electric Light Orchestra, science museums and great cathedrals. Several of the videos are weird and sci-fi enough that you would actually get the creeps, if it weren't for the music. The music--most of it rhythmic, layered, building, techno rock--serves as an interplanetary, interspecies language that makes you feel a bizarre kinship with these foreign and wildly talented music machines.

Animusic is the creation, passion and sole occupation of a programmer/composer named Wayne Lytle (rhymes with title), who works at home and has spent over a decade perfecting this extremely nichey art form. What's wild about the process is that his proprietary, custom-written software, called Animusic Studio, generates the animation automatically--that is, manipulates the fingers, hammers and pluckers of the robots--when fed the MIDI file of his music. "If the music is changed, the animation is regenerated effortlessly," according to the production notes.

For that reason, the instruments are sonically correct: every time a given drum is struck or key is pressed, it always produces the same pitch. (There's still plenty of hand animation, of course, primarily having to do with the lighting, "camera moves," set and character movements.)

The best part of Animusic--both the original DVD and the newly released, richer and more sophisticated Animusic 2--is people's reactions. First they just gape in amazement.

Then they start wondering what it's for, or what Lytle "ought to do" with it. "Play it on big plasmas in dance clubs!" someone will say. Or "Music teachers in schools should show this to the kids!" Or, "He should sell it to Pixar!"

At the educational-technology conference where I first saw Animusic, the educators asked similarly off-the-point questions. "What's the target age group?" "What's your educational philosophy?" "How come it's not interactive?"

Mr. Lytle answered as politely as he could, but the answers all boiled down to, "I don't know, it's just cool."

That it is. And--if viewer conversation, discussion and thinking are part of the definition--it's art.

You can see and hear segments of the Animusic tracks at www.animusic.com, although you should remember that the effect is 100 times more powerful when played on a TV (especially a big one) and through a sound system, preferably 5.1 Dolby surround. That Web site is where you can buy the DVD's, too ($20 each, or $35 for the pair--a great holiday present, if you ask me); Mr. Lytle says he's sold 60,000 copies of the first disc over the years, as the cult of Animusic fans has grown virally.

Wayne Lytle and his team could be poster children for the way that technology can give a voice and a canvas to otherwise undiscovered talent. In the case of Animusic, that talent is prodigious, and the resulting works of art are awe-inspiring.

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