With having a huge interest in generative art and automation I decided to look into creating visualisations. Using music I was able to produce a graphic visualisation that was syncronised to the music as it played.

I explored two pieces of software, After Effects and Flash to construct these visualisations - each with their own pros and cons.

With the After Effects work (the software being primarily video and motion based), I was able to convert the waveform of the audio into keyframes of certain values which represented the bass and treble of the audio. Then using Trapcode plugins I was able to create particles that reacted to this data which produced the following effects. I quite like the smoothness and depth of these visualisations, however they are not real-time based and do take a long time to render.

With Flash I delved into the newly released Actionscript 3.0 which came with the compute.Spectrum function - allowing users to gather data from an audio source. This data was then used along with various scripts that produced a visualisation effect which created the following work. The thing with Actionscript is that it allows the visualisation to run in real-time, although I much prefer the style of the After Effects work.

These visualisations (especially the Actionscript ones) could be used in VJ (visual DJ) work where visual projections are made that relate to the music that is playing.