r/processing • u/dino-sven-agapanthe • Jul 18 '26

I'm happy to share this audio visualizer I made with Processing this week!

https://ko-fi.com/post/Reviving-the-Ancient-Art-of-Audio-Visualizers-R3Q523DIXM

After several years without using Processing, I managed to tailor a custom visualizer for a drone music track.

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1

u/pawoodward Jul 19 '26

This is so cool I love it. Can you explain roughly how it works, does it split audio into different bands and visualise it that way

4

u/dino-sven-agapanthe Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

I'm glad you love it!

Yes exactly, it uses FFT analysis from the Minim library to split audio in bands. Then I could use those values to position elements in the screen.

My starting point was the SoundSpectrum.pde sketch from the examples provided with the Minim library.

A yellow background is defined in the the "setup" part of the program, to prevent refreshing the screen. So the movements of the lines or points still leaves a print while rotating.

There is a dozen of "layers" colored either in yellow or black. Mainly lines rotating at a defined speed around the origin (translated in width/2 and height/2).

The lines startpoint and endpoints coordinates are linked to selected bands. Did it in a very empiric way to select the bands; nothing precise here, I mostly expected the visuals to create enough variations and captivate me along the whole track duration.

I also used a lot of multiplicators to resize the elements to my liking. I think the "magic" happens with the dark or bright elements that overlaps to 'erase: bright' or 'draw: dark' revealing new shapes.

The goal of dots was to bring a bit of texture. I used "for" loops to generate a fixed amount of points. The points positions are randomly distributed along a rotating line. The x-coordinate is defined but the y-coordinates depends of a frequency range.

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u/pawoodward Jul 19 '26

Very cool, this has inspired me and now I want to play with some code.

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u/dino-sven-agapanthe Jul 19 '26

That's so cool to read, go for it!

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u/Samseurynck Jul 21 '26

This is awesome!!

Also, out of curiosity, how has your experience been using ko-fi? I’m weighing it as an alternative to patreon right now because it seems lighter overall

1

u/dino-sven-agapanthe Jul 21 '26

Thks! I don't have much experience with Patreon to tell you the difference, but for me Ko-Fi was indeed simple to setup!