Show HN: I made a volumetric audio visualizer

I am not sure sure what is causing it, but it takes a solid 2 to 3 minutes on my computer before it does anything. I load a file and it feels like it freezes and firefox gave me a warning banner that the tab was causing all of firefox to slow down. Same thing is Chrome and I have a i7-10750h. Some people might mistake that for it not working since there is not UI feedback of anything happening. Windows 10.<p>I got two different tracks to work, and it&#x27;s clear that one was a lot harder to process than the other. It took noticeably more time on the second one, to start and the CPU utilization was higher as well. They were both instrumental tracks in the same format and around the same length. The one simpler to process was the instrumental of Britney Spear&#x27;s Baby One More Time. The harder one was Porter Robinson&#x27;s Divinity.<p>Neither audio had an effect similar to the one from the demo video, but were interesting regardless. They both looked like how I imagine sound waves echo and bounce around if contained in a cube shape.<p>I appreciate the notebook writeup where you described the goals because the visualization wasn&#x27;t inherently intuitive with the sound. I chose much more complex tones than your demo. I imagine the feature extraction is much easier on isolated sounds. This reminds me a lot of project milkdrop and so I was expecting it to be closer to that but in 3d. That was probably a misunderstanding on my part of the goals for this.<p>I think exposing more parameters about how features get mapped and scaled would be really helpful in making it feel more intuitive. Zooming the cube in and out is nice but didn&#x27;t seem to help convey more information with the tracks I chose. If anything it got in the way because on my computer the zoom sensitivity was very very high.<p>I look forward to seeing where this goes.

You might want to include some audio (or maybe it&#x27;s there and not loading in my browser) so people who try it can see what it is right away. People also don&#x27;t have to wonder what happens to their audio file to check it out.

For those wanting a textual description: It seems to take a FFT of the audio and put it into rings (something like frequency = ring size), and those rings are then duplicated&#x2F;projected to make spheres, the rings (above a certain size) are truncated to a cube shape. There is an option to have the rings move over the length of the sphere&#x2F;cube so you can see the FFT over time.

Looks neat, it sort of reminds me of winamp visualization plugins. It’s probably a good learning experience but as far as utility, in a recording studio, I fail to see how this would bring anything to the table besides it just being some cool visual thing.

This is interesting. I wonder if it could be used in speech therapy, to help the speaker understand the difference between what a sound should sound like, and the sound coming out of their mouths.<p>I personally have problems saying two different letters differently, and I just recorded myself trying to say both letters. Sure enough, there is very little difference in the way they are both displayed. I will ask other people to say this letters, and see if I can spot the difference. Then I should be able to play around with differing lip, mouth, tongue, and larynx positions to see how close I can come.<p>Any tips for highlighting subtle differences in specific places would be appreciated!

I tried it on my iPhone with an mp3. It displayed what looked like a blue aerogel. I could zoom in and rotate but I couldn’t tell what kind of information it was trying to convey. It wasn’t playing the audio or changing with time in any way either.

It&#x27;s really accurate to the music being played<p>I found a slightly-to-the side isometric closely-zoomed-in view to best show the finer waves and cadences being visualized<p>You should provide example track&#x2F;s<p>10&#x2F;10

I really like this. Thank you for posting it and sharing code. It&#x27;s in line with my interests and I&#x27;m going to use the heck out of it.

Works exactly once but only on short files, then I have to close browser (all windows) and restart. Chrome, Ubuntu.

Some visual feedback to show the file is loading would help but this is neat.

Broke for me on FF and chrome

What is the point of making this 3D when it seems to be circularly symmetric? Just replace the circle with a line and make it 2D, yeah?

I agree a 3d visual would be useful for spatialization and mixing but I don’t see how it would be useful for anything else.

Went to pick a song from my music library to try, only to find that the visualizer doesn&#x27;t support flac.

I tried to open mp3 but nothing happened. Chrome outdated on Windows x32. Will try on a decent pc later.

Looks good - maybe supply a demo audio file for those of us who don&#x27;t have any locally?

Worked for me :) Neat!