The genealogy research website MyHeritage has been rolling out new photo enhancement tools over the last few months that allow you to enhance (sharpen and clean up) and colorize old photographs. Their latest addition has now gone viral.
You can now animate old photographs with their Deep Nostalgia feature. An ancestor you never knew can blink, move their head, and smile at you. It can be eerily accurate, depending on the photo.
Some folks, however, are animating more than just family photos. Classicfm.com has presented on its website a video of composers brought to life with this new technology. And they didn’t just use photographs: Bach has been reanimated from one of his portraits, as has Mozart. You can see the video here. Be aware that the music is a little loud when you hit play.
I tried my hand with family photos and drawings, with mixed results–it all depends on the resolution of the original, head angle, and shadowing, in particular (you’ll see that with the Clara Schumann animation in the video mentioned above). There’s a fellow I’ve written about before here, the mystery pianist Granville Reynolds, Here is his animation. Somehow, the animation makes him even more mysterious. What could he be thinking about?
The echoes of nostalgia and remembrance are complicated, and that is what I hear in the piece that I give you in closing. Here is an animation of Chopin. Here is his Mazurka, Op. 56 No. 3, played by Daniil Trifonov.
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Image attributions: Photograph of Granville Reynolds, family photograph. Enhanced, colorized, and animated by MyHeritage.com. Detail of daguerreotype of Frederic Chopin by Louis-Auguste Bisson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frederic_Chopin_photo.jpeg, enhanced, colorized, and animated by MyHeritage.com.
Catapulting into Classical 