VaporRave - A Music Visualizer

by Cody Hergenroeder


The following visualizer was made in Ge Wang's course Artful Design of Computer Music. It features a live-synced historical spectrogram of the audio (see the pink meshes on the left and right sides) and a live-synced spherical rendition of the audio waveform (see the glowing halo around the sun). This project was made as a contemporary exploration of the vaporwave aesthetic. Scroll down to see the visualizer used to showcase my original song.





See VaporRave in Action


Controls

-SPACE: Zooms in/out. Makes the camera shake, decreases camera FOV, increases plane size, and increases intensity of the spectrogram.
-z: Get funky! Rotates waveform 90 degrees, changes particle pattern.
-r: Turns your spectrogram a glowing golden. Alternating presses changes its shininess.
-n: Play test song (mutes mic input).
-s: Play my original song "Hyperbolic", as seen in the demo (mutes mic input).
-m: Re-enable mic input.

Builds

Production Build (run me!)
(For running the project or looking at source code. This was built for Windows 10.)

Unity Project
(For editing the project or rebuilding it for your OS using Unity.)

Code References and Assets Used


I used these tutorials for mesh generation in the spectrogram. I used the following vaporwave sun image. Camera shake effect from github. Figured out how to modify atmosphere in code from here. Spectrum history data structure help: thanks Kunwoo and Marise!! As well as the help of everyone on the class Discord chat.

Parting Notes


This project was inspired by my recent fascination with the vaporwave aesthetic--I wanted to capture some of the eerie notalgia and abstractness vaporwave gives but in the form of an audiovisual experience. In the process it became something new, with the black platform and background visuals reminding me of the days where I played TOOL on Guitar Hero. I knew there were many directions I could go in with this aesthetic, so I just traveled in the directions that my hands took me while building the thing. I'm surprised that I didn't put in more "vaporwave" aesthetic elements like palm trees and such, but I found that the thing didn't need them to be its best self. I am passionate about music visualization, so I was surprised to find that Chunity made it so easy to create a music visualizer. I certainly wouldn't have made my own visualizer had it not been for this course.