Introduction

The Audio Visualizer is called “The Space Race Track”. It creates an visual experience of flying through a glowing field of light towards the distance, surrounded by curved shapes on the sides, as if traveling on a magical race track in space.

Narrative & Demo

Screenshots

Instructions

• N to toggle narrative / mic input

• [ ] to control amplitude of flight

• F to toggle flight mode

• G to toggle dynamic field width (“gorge” mode)

• WASD and Up/Down arrow to control camera position

• QE to control camera angle

Links to your files of various kinds

Idea

Motion is at the core of my design. I started out with a mountain-river landscape in mind, because I love the idea of making the viewer feel like they’re traveling with the river (i.e. the spectrum hisotry) dynamically as if one with the water, speeding through the mountain landscapes on the side. This is to break away with the existing sndpeek design, where the user just stares at the spectrum graph moving away from a static viewpoint. The design of the form is inspired by this functional requirement of creating a sense of motion for the viewer that aligns with the music.

As my design develops, it ultimately gains a style of its own – a minimalist design that abstracts away the landscape metaphor into curves and light. (Thanks to (an abuse) of the bloom-effect) The abstract visuals now take the metaphor towards a race track in space, a change I’m happy to let happen.

Initially it was difficult to make it “read”, especially how to make the mountain curves, which is randomly generated, somehow interplay with the waveform and still read. After some trials and errors, I decided simple interpolations just don’t work that well. I finally settled on representing volume as short sine wave “perturbations” on top of the curves. This way the perturbation to the original curve is small enough so that viewers can still perceive the mountain as continuous and at the same time graps its relationship with the audio.

I was especially grateful to Ge for pointing out its resemblance to the “Stargate Sequence” scene in 2001, a Space Odyssey. I got a lot of inspiration from studying that scene, and use them to enrich my own design and align my expectations. Apart from that, writing the ChucK piece with no prior composing experience was also challenging, and I want to thank my friend Anto for his guidance. Overall, it was a super enjoyable experience.