Spatial Music Visualizer

10 September 2017 ● 1 min read ● 1 image
Spatial Music Visualizer

Inside Music is a Google WebVR Experiment that lets you step inside a song, giving you a closer look at how music is made. The bonus is the music is spatialized as well so you get a completely different audio experience from a normal stereo mix.

Open the Song Visualizer: https://sonicviz.gitlab.io/sonicviz-spatial-music/
You can move around using the WASD keys and mouse, just like a regular game controller mode.

"Interaction
Select a song from the menu. The stems of the song will appear in a circle around you, each represented by a sphere. In 360 Mode, tap the spheres to turn them on or off. In VR Mode, you can use your controller to toggle their state. On Google Cardboard, you will have a retical (a small circle in front of you eye) which can be used to turn the stems on and off."

I thought it would be a good opportunity to pull apart and test it with a couple of my own songs. I used Among The Clouds (https://www.canvas.co.com/creations/3850) and
Funk-o-Tronic (https://www.canvas.co.com/creations/3824) as the audio sources. It's worthwhile having a listen to the stereo mixes as a comparison to the spatial mix in the visualizer to hear the differences. There's huge potential with spatial music to revolutionize music production and delivery, and we're only just getting started.

There's a bit of a process to go through, including configuring your development workflow and tools but in the end it's a pretty cool way of getting inside the music. I also used it as an opportunity to test gitlab CI and page hosting.

Next step will be to extend it with some custom visualizations, refine the asset pipeline workflow. I've actually had a similar concept bouncing around to do in Unity3D so I'll probably do that at some point.

Project Page: http://www.sonicviz.com/wp/project/spatial-music/

There are no comments on this creation yet.

You can log in to post a comment.

About Paul

Paul Cohen

I'm a producer in Tokyo, Japan

Creative Technologist

See full profile

Welcome to Canvas Tokyo

Canvas is an online network for Tokyo's creative community. It's a place for professional and amateur creatives to show their skills, make new connections and find work.

Sign up to Canvas