Soft With Meaning: an offline companion for Vivaldi's Four Seasons, built for one friend
A friend of mine listens to Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the quiet. They asked me to listen to it while they were away and tell them what I heard. I did, and what stayed with me is that the piece is not pretty. Spring ends in a storm. Summer ends by destroying what spring grew. Autumn's hunt ends with the prey dying in descending chromatic steps. Winter ambushes you with the coldest bars in the…
A close friend of the author listens to Vivaldi's Four Seasons while they are away. The author listened to the piece and found that it is not merely pretty; the music conveys deeper meaning. Spring ends with a storm, summer ends in destruction, autumn's hunt culminates in the demise of the prey, and winter brings the coldest notes.
The author shared this insight with their friend, who responded, "I like to think it's soft with meaning." This insight became the primary goal for the project. The author created an offline companion that shows the music's progress and answers questions about it while keeping the user's data private. The companion allows users to select a season and movement, view the written-in meaning, including sonnets, annotations, and word painting, and explore the musical motifs.
The companion runs entirely on the user's device, with no data leaving their machine. The author built a small corpus based on the sonnets and annotations, using a lightweight model called all-MiniLM-L6-v2 to return the closest lines to the user's questions. If the model fails to load, the page falls back to plain word search and makes it clear what is happening.
The project is a simple yet thoughtful response to the user's request, focusing on a personal connection rather than commercial success.
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