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:

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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.

I recently had some time to experiment with Papervision at Big Spaceship and try out a new visualization. You can read my BSS Labs Post “Spectracular Music” to learn more about the making of.

Click the image below to see the visualization:

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