Concept
The “Eye of the Sound” is a project which transforms sound into mesmerizing visual art using the principles of physics. There are many others before me who have used music as a way of generating artwork, like:
However, there was one artwork which was quite interesting to see on Vimeo: A circular spectrogrram. This project would be based on this visualization at the core and would be expanded on that too.
This spectrogram appears to be mostly based on the loudness of the sound, and though it is an intriguing and cool artwork, has no user interaction, no generative features, and so on. That’s where my project, “Eye of the sound” comes in. It would be based on sensory experiences of sound and sight, and the circular flow is inspired from the flow of life, and the end is quite similar to the ‘Iris’ of the eye, a symbol of life.
Implementation
I have a basic idea of what must be done in the project. The central part of the project would be FFT (Fast Fourier Transform Analysis) to distinguish the different frequencies in the song, and then use a linear visualizer to display it. The visualizer’s displacement from the mean position is stored in an array, and is used to display the results on a rotating graphics buffer layer. The layer is rotating in one direction, and the visualizer in the opposite direction to cancel the rotation effect and “appear” stationary.
The color of the imprints on the layer are based on the loudness, and the intensity of the imprints is determined by the FFT analysis. The subtitles are displayed below.
The user also has another option in which they are able to sing along with the music being played, and their voice imprints are also calculated and diplayed in the same manner but in a different color scheme according to them.
This means that providing a menu screen for the user in which the instructions are provided and separate buttons are there to lead them to the mode they want.
Improvements which can be made
- Adding a choosing the song screen, where the user can select some songs from some options in both the modes
- Adding a sprite running loading bar for the amount of song left
- Adding some generative effects on the subtitles, or some sparkle effects on the “highs” of a song
- Adding a performance score in the second mode to see how well the user has done with the song
- A “Save Canvas” option for the user to store their experiences.