Particle Vomit - Audiovisualizer & Musical Narrative

Particle Vomit is an audiovisualizer consisting of particles spewing off into the distance, as a bunch of lines snake around the red squares.

Screenshots

Instructions

Usage of particle vomit is simple: after starting the visualizer, press 'n' to start playing the musical narrative, or press 'm' to take in mic input.

Production Build

You can download the production build here.

Unity Project

You can download the Unity project here.

Comments and Reflections

Out of all the audiovisualizer this is definitely one of them. I wanted to make a vortex-y movement from outside the frame inward, and I wanted to also make this short of flashing lightining effect. The particles show the spectrum history, and the lightning effect's intensity reflects the waveform. The particles rotation according to an envelope follower. In terms of "read," I think that the spectrum history and envelope follower are fairly obvious, the lightning is a little more abstract in the sense that it doesn't form the shape of a waveform (the segments of the lines are randomly connected particles, it's only the intensity of an individual segment that reflects the amplitude of a sample. However, especially with the percussive nature of my musical narrative that is still pretty obvious.

I was wanting to go for an abstract aesthetic with this, and what ended up working was the bichrome retro-y thing so that's fun.

The process was mostly fine, the difficulties mostly came from dealing with the quirks of (Ch)Unity - how it expects you to control particles not lining up with what I wanted, the build process causing very non-obvious error, and also issues with chugins caused by incompatible builds on Windows.

I had a lot of fun with the musical narrative, mostly just me going crazy with the sporks and the harmonic series.

I would like to thank the unity documentation and everyone who actually asks questions on forums.

[Milestone #2] Progress Updates

Here is my visualizer in progress! Currently it is not audioreactive at all, I've spend the last week figuring out the visual components, which I feel like I've got a solid baseline for what I want for those, now I need to hook everything up and tweak some things.

the three components that are shown in the video are:

The particles. These are being emitted from a ring around the camera. They move towards the center making a sort of continuously flowing, whirlpool thing. The plan is for these to communicate spectra information, probably with angle of the particles being emitted and their size/amount corresponding to spectra information. This also serves to display the history of the spectra.

The dotted lines in the background. The intensity of these lines is going to correspond to the amplitude of the time-domain information. These lines are randomized in order to make this web-like effect, which will make the amplitude relationship a little less obvious/won't read as well, but I'm thinking that the affect of it is worth the tradeoff.

The lightning bolts. These are the solid lines jumping around a lot. My plan is the have these correspond to the centroid or some other measure of the fundamental/average pitch, namely setting the starting point of the bolt based off of this. With the sound's intensity corresponding to the number/size of the lightning bolt.

[Milestone #1] Brainstorming Project Ideas

Use many light sources to visualize the sound - maybe have position be time domain and color be frequency domain.
Make a literal waterfall plot. Have a waterfall where the flow corresponds to intensity. This could work for either time or frequency. For the other one, maybe there could be rocks at the bottom of the falls that dynamically grow and shrink.

Tutorial Progress

I think my main takeaway from going through the tutorials is that it's going to be interesting/tricky to build up a project with so many different enironments and languages integrated together. Debugging will be interesting with chuck/c#/unity all talking to each other.