The final form of my audio visualizer maintains the same intentions and general form as the milestone: the candle is meant to entrance the viewer, while displaying the spectrum and spectrum history in the "aura" of the flame and the current waveform in the base. However, in this final version, I also mapped the brightness of the flame to amplitude and added interpolation to create smoother "melting" and "flickering" effects. As a designer, I came in with a very clear vision of what I wanted to create– a candle– and opted for an overall simple form with more complex motion elements to create interest. My greatest challenge, then, was figuring out how to technically implement my ideas. I experimented with many aspects of ChuGL, and thought of this project a bit like a ChucK/ChuGL etude, trying to push myself to add some technical complexity where possible to increase the depth and variation of my design.

You can run ~flame~ on your device using this ChucK code. To start the built-in audio, press the space bar when the program has launched.

My audio visualizer is in the form of a candle, meant to hypnotize the viewer as it responds to sound input from the microphone. The "aura" of the candle displays the spectrum and spectrum history of the audio input, while the base displays the current waveform. As a designer, I started with the general idea of creating a candle where the light "aura" was the spectrum. Initially, I thought of doing a Halloween-style candelabra, but, once I created one of the candles, I appreciated how mesmirizing the experience of watching the center of the flame was and decided to focus on creating one candle instead. Since I had not worked with ChuGL before, I wanted the design to be relatively simple, with only a few elements– the waterfall "aura", the flickering flame and the "melting" candle base- and I spent most of my time on this milestone exploring how I could refine parameters to create the depth and motion that I wanted in the graphics.