Music visualization, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and in a way synchronized with the music as it is played.
Table of Contents
- Books
- Downloads
- Experiments
- Experiments Codepen
- Libraries Audio
- Libraries Visualization
- People to Follow
- Tutorials
- Videos
Books
Downloads
- Soundwhich
- Beeple's resource (inspirational C4D "open source" files)
- Freesound
- Audio Jungle
- Six Bit Deep
- Samplephonics - Free Stuff
- Wave Alchemy
- Audio Animals
- Bed Room Producers Blog
- Free Music Archive
- Music Radar
- How to Make Electronic Music Freebies
- Motion Sound
- Cava - A cross-platform terminal visualizer.
Experiments
- Audible Visuals - Collection of visualizers derived from the Archimedean spiral by Sonia Boller.
- React Player - A complete Audio Visualisation player with ReactJS.
- Moire - A Web Audio / WebGL visualisation.
- Finding Love - fully interactive, Virtual Reality story that transforms emotions into art.
- Tangled - Audio-visual release by Berlin based netlabel Yarn Audio, visuals made in cables. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.
- Luis Henrique Bizarro Portfolio - Portfolio with experiments using Three.JS and GSLS.
- Adventure Machine - Campaign for Madeon's "Adventure" album.
- BBNG - WebGL Visualizer for "Confessions" (feat. Leland Whitty) by BADBADNOTGOOD.
- Chrome Music Lab - Play with simple experiments and explore how music works.
- DENNIS - An interactive and audio responsive music video for "Dennis" by popcorn_10's.
- Fluctus - Experimental 3D Audio Visualizer by Jordan Machado.
- George & Jonathan III - Campaign for George & Jonathan's "III" album.
- Lantern - WebGL Visualizer for "Lantern" by SBTRKT.
- Lines - Visualising Joy Division album cover as a music spectrum by Silvio Paganini.
- Nero - WebGL Visualizer for "In The Way" by Nero.
- Pareidolia - WebGL Visualizer for "Szerencsétlen" by Venetian Snares.
- Splice - A realtime interactive music visualizer using time-code data from Splice's upcoming visualizer API.
- Typatone - Make music while you write.
- Yume - Campaign for Helios' "Yume" album.
- Silk - 3D Audio Visualizer by Matt DesLauriers.
- Wave - 3D Audio Visualizer by Matt DesLauriers.
- Binaural - Experiment using Binaural and Reverb audio effects by Matt DesLauriers.
- Word Problems - WebGL Visualizer for "Word Problems" by Harmonic 313.
- Glitch - An algorithmic synthesizer to make music from math.
- 105 Birthday Clara Rockmore - A Doodle for the Birthday of Clara Rockmore.
- Fireworks with WebGL - Sound driven fireworks by Ondřej Žára.
- Glowsynth - just amazing! - Play with your mouse, Qwerty keyboad, or MIDI keyboard and watch as the lights dance to your music.
- Mmorph - An adventure into new ways of delivering interactive music in the browser and beyond.
- Loop Waveform Visualizer - WebGL Visualizer for Screw Base by Beytah.
- Scrollsound - Scrolling as a method of interaction with audio on the web by Ehsan Ziya.
- Experiment #8 - Music Experiment by Bruno Imbrizi.
- Music Cube - A Chrome Experiment that combines the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine with the Rubik's Cube.
- Music Game - ECHO - A challenging musical puzzle game.
- Patatap - A portable animation and sound kit.
- Plink - Awesome Multiplayer Game - A multiplayer music experience.
- Soundcloud Visualizer - A Canvas and Web Audio Experiment.
- CSS Visualizer - Music Visualizers that are made entirely using DOM elements and CSS3.
- Kandinski Experiment - Music Visualizations inspired in Kandinsky.
- Visual Music Trailer - Live audio visual performance ideas.
- Draw and Music - Campaign for Rugs new album by Sam Greens.
- Moogfest Substrate - Experimental site to Moogfest.
- 3D Grid - Audio visualizer built with HTML5 web audio API by rickycodes.
- obsidian - 3D Audio Visualization made by the creator of Three.js.
- TRIF - GIF-based online radio visualization using webaudio API and raw CSS
- Audiograph - Amazing audio visualization made by Matt DesLauriers.
- Scribble Audio - Draw loops of sound with this web synthesizer.
- Touchpianist - play a piano and look all animations along the screen.
- PartyMode - An experimental music visualizer using d3.js and the web audio api.
- DJi - Clean music visualizer from SoundCloud or self uploaded.
- VR Ondes Martenot - A playable rendition of the Ondes Martenot in Virtual Reality.
- Popcorn - Little audio-reactive sketch by Hugh Kennedy.
- Musical Interactions - Some experimental ideas for playful musical interactions.
- ClubberToy Several shadertoys, rewired with clubber, bundled as a vj app.
- Andantino Listen some notes and try to find same notes on the keyboard.
- Vissonance A collection of audio visualizers built in THREE.js.
- ShowCQTBar - Audio spectrum visualization with musical scale.
- Weekly Music Visualizations Weekly music visualization experiments built with Three.js and p5.js by Suraya Shivji.
- Audio Visualizer - An interesting web audio visualizer built with Pixi.js.
- YouTube Musical Spectrum - A browser extension that offers audio visualization on your YouTube page with nice musical notes.
- Just Dance - A 3D Audio Visualization made with BabylonJS & 2D Perlin Noise.
- audioMotion - High-resolution real-time audio spectrum analyzer and full-featured music player written in JavaScript. Includes binaries for Windows, Linux and macOS.
- p5.js Audio Visualizer - A powerful, beat- and amplitude-responsive audio visualizer created with p5.sound, on an HTML5 Canvas by Amanda Yeh.
Experiments on Codepen
- SVG Animated Drum Kit - Play an amazing Drum made with SVG and realistic sounds by @iamjoshellis.
- SVG Animated Guitar - Play an amazing Guitar made with SVG and realistic sounds by @iamjoshellis.
- Audio Visualizer - Abstract Audio Visualizer using Three.js by Francesco Trillini
- Awesome Audio Player - Radial Audio Player constructed by lines of frequency and amplitude by Alex Permyakov
- Wireframes - Wireframe WebGL Animation with Three.js by Patrick Heng
- Soundcloud Vinyl Search - An amazing experiment creating a realistic Vinyl player using DrawSVG and GSAP by Chris Gannon.
- Gooey Effect Audio - Upload your mp3 and visualize the song with this crazy effect by Jeremy Karlsson.
- CSS Audio Visualizer - Using audio frequency data from a hidden video to apply CSS scaling by Neil McCallion.
- Storytelling with Html5 + CSS3 - A great example of how to use music to create a Storytelling by Rachel Nabors.
- Step sequencer - Create music with this sequencer by Joe Harry.
- WebGL Soundcloud Visualizer using Three.js - ThreeJS/WebGL Soundcloud player/visualizer based on HTML5 AudioContext API by Luigi Mannoni.
- Oscilator - Testing the oscillator node from HTML5 audio API by Anej Gorkič.
- Cubes Audio Visualizer - 10th contribution for codevember 2015 by Patrick Heng.
- P5 Audio Tests 33 - Audio visualization using p5.js 3D elements and Soundcloud API
- P5 Audio Tests 27 - Audio visualization using p5.js 3D elements and Soundcloud API
- CircleLineNERDDISCO - Audio visualization with amazing analyser by Tim Pietrusky.
- Clubberize yin yang example - An example using the clubberize helper to easily integrate clubber.js in javascript apps.
Libraries Audio
- web-audio-analyser - A thin wrapper around the Web Audio API that takes an element and gives you its waveform/frequency data in return.
- web-audio-player - A cross-browser Web Audio player.
- web-media-playback - Retrieve playback and buffering information about audio or video playing in the browser.
- Pizzicato.js - Simplify the way you create and manipulate sounds via the Web Audio API.
- ThreeAudio.js - Helps you create music visualizations in Three.js or tQuery.
- Beeplay.js - Write a song In JavaScript.
- MIDI.js - Making life easy to create a MIDI-app on the web.
- Beep.js - A JavaScript toolkit for building browser-based synthesizers.
- p5.sound - Brings the Processing approach to Web Audio and p5.js.
- Audiolet - A JavaScript library for real-time audio synthesis and composition.
- coffee-collider - A language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition in HTML5.
- audio-render - A pass-through audio stream, providing structure for rendering stream audio data.
- Octavian - Utilities for reasoning about musical notes, frequencies, and intervals
- waveform-data - Audio Waveform Data Manipulation API – resample, offset and segment waveform data in JavaScript.
- audiowaveform - C++ program to generate waveform data and render waveform images from audio files.
- Aubio - C library for realtime audio labeling with bindings for Python and PD, support for ofx and Vamp.
- audio - Generic Go package designed to define a common interface to analyze and/or process audio data
- wav - Battle tested Wav decoder/encoder
- standardized-audio-context - A cross-browser implementation of the AudioContext which aims to closely follow the standard.
- web-audio-beat-detector - A beat detection utility which is using the Web Audio API.
- meyda - Audio feature extraction for JavaScript.
Libraries Visualization
- p5.js - A JavaScript library for creating graphic and interactive experiences, based on the core principles of Processing.
- Pixi.js - A fast lightweight 2D library that works across all devices. The Pixi renderer allows everyone to enjoy the power of hardware acceleration without prior knowledge of WebGL.
- sketch.js - Let's you get straight to the fun parts of creative coding, without ever having to worry about shims or boilerplate code.
- three.js - Three.js is a library that makes WebGL easy to use.
- Two.js - A two-dimensional drawing API geared towards modern web browsers. It is renderer agnostic enabling the same API to draw in multiple contexts: SVG, Canvas, and WebGL.
- BabylonJS - A complete JavaScript framework for building 3D games with HTML5, WebGL and Web Audio.
- Web Audio Extension - A Chrome extension to play with Web Audio.
- Cinder - A community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.
- Processing - An open source programming language and integrated development environment built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities.
- HYPE_processing - Collection of Processing classes that performs heavy lifting tasks while using a minimal amount of code writing.
- The Force - Live coded shader editing with audio input.
- Hylogen - Purely functional language embedded in Haskell for expressive live coding of fragment shaders (with audio input).
- Peaks.js - Modular client-side JavaScript component designed for the display of and interaction with audio waveform material in the browser.
- Clubber.js - Application of music theory in audio reactive visualizations.
- Vuo — A realtime visual programming language for interactive media.
- wavesurfer.js - A customizable audio waveform visualization, built on top of Web Audio API and HTML5 Canvas
- wavebell - A javascript voice recorder with realtime waveform, using web microphone
- Circular Audio Wave - A JS library for audio visualization in circular wave using Web Audio API and ECharts
- Slang - An audio programming language built in JS
- audioMotion-analyzer - High-resolution real-time audio spectrum analyzer JS module with no dependencies.
- Cava - A cross-platform terminal visualizer.
- Muser - Using machine learning to enhance music visualization in the browser.
People to Follow
- Aaron Koblin - Artist, designer, programmer, and entrepreneur specializing in data and digital technologies.
- Joshua Davis - An American designer, technologist, author and artist in new media.
- Robert Hodgin - A creative coder living in Brooklyn. Co-creator of the Cinder C++.
- Seb Lee-Delisle - An award-winning digital artist and speaker.
- Raven Kwok - A visual artist, animator and creative programmer.
- Chris Wilson - Open Web Guy, formerly of Microsoft and now working as a Developer Advocate at Google.
- Jason Sigal - Creative Coder in residence at NYU's and creator of web audio library for p5.js.
- Shawn Lawson - An experiential media artist creating the computational sublime.
- Matt DesLauriers - Creative coder at Jam 3.
- Patrick Heng - Creative front-end developer. Studied at Hetic and Gobelins and works at Grouek.
- Mat Preziotte - Absurd music visualizations and generative art.
- Yannis Gravezas - A creative coder with several projects featured in chrome experiments, fwa and elsewhere.
Tutorials
- Kadenze - Courses about Sound and Creative Process
- MDN - Basic concepts behind Web Audio API
- Understanding AudioParams: Precision control of web audio nodes
- Making An Interactive Music Video With WebGL
- Exploring the web audio api with d3
- Getting Started with Web Audio API
- 14 essential JavaScript audio libraries for web developers
- Learning Web Audio API
- Fun with Web Audio API
- The Audio Processing Dog House
- Web Audio School
- Audio visualisation with the web audio api
- Make Your Browser Dance
- Audio Visualization with Web Audio and Three.js
- Applying Web Audio API with the HTML5 Canvas Element - Part I
- Applying Web Audio API with the HTML5 Canvas Element - Part II
- Real-time analysis of streaming audio data with Web Audio API
- Syncing CSS Animations with HTML5 Audio
- Javascript Systems Music - Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno
- Creative Audio Visualizers
- Recreating legendary 8-bit games music with Web Audio API
- Visualizing sound in Go with SDL
Videos
- Matt McKegg: I Play The JavaScript - JSConf.Asia 2015
- Chris Lowis: A Brief History of Synthesis with the Web Audio API
- Introducing the Web Audio API
- CorkDev.IO - HTML 5 Web Audio API
- Steve Kinney: Building a musical instrument with the Web Audio API | JSConf US 2015
- Making the Web Rock: The Web Audio API
- Jordan Santell: Signal Processing with the Web Audio API - JSConf2014
- Making waves using the Web Audio API
- Stuart Memo: JavaScript is the new Punk Rock
- Jan Krutisch: JavaScript Patterns For Contemporary Dance Music -- JSConf EU 2013
- Charlie Roberts: Gibbering at Algoraves - JS in Live Audiovisual Performances - JSConf.Asia 2014
- Lauren McCarthy: Learning while making p5js
- Interactive Music with Tone.js
- Web Audio API vs Native: Closing the Gap
- BRAID: A Web Audio Instrument Builder with Embedded Code Blocks
- Web Audio Tools
- HTML5DevConf: Jordan Santell, "Browser Dance Party: Visualizing Audio with the Web Audio API"
- Praveen Kumar - MIDI.js
- Mathieu 'p01' Henri: Making Realtime Audio-Visuals - JSConf.Asia 2015
- Paul Adenot: Elements of Dance Music - JSConf.Asia 2015
- 8-bit Music Theory
Contributing
Your contributions are always welcome! Click here to read the guidelines.
Authors
Willian Justen | Luis Henrique | Márcio Ribeiro |
License
To the extent possible under law, Willian Justen has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.