I’ve been playing around a lot with gravity and repulsion for force based layouts recently. I guess it’s no surprise that I eventually had to turn it in to another sound visualization. Here’s the result:

Open Visualization as Layer - Open Visualization in a New Window

(Click the fullscreen icon in the options menu for optimal performance.)

There are three emitters, one for each frequency range: lows, mids and highs. Every emitter either has an attractive or repulsive force which depends on the volume of the emitter’s frequency range. If for example the base is strong, that emitter will act as a repulsive field and force all particles away. If at the same time another frequency range is weak it will attract all particles surrounding it, basically sucking them up.

In addition to a force, each emitter has its own color which influences all particles surrounding it. The closer a particle gets to an emitter the more it will take its color. To keep the particles from being randomly scattered around the stage there is an invisible fourth emitter which acts as a counter-weight to all the other emitters. If the sum of all emitters’ repulsive forces is high, the fourth emitter will attract particles so that they aren’t just blown off the stage.

Tags: ActionScript, Experiment, Flash, Particles, Sound Visualization, Source Code

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 16:12 and is filed under Particles, experiments, sound vis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.