Kinetic Music Visualization

This project is based on the kinetic sculpture devised, described and developed by Severin Engert in his Master thesis. My team and I were to come up with ideas on how to use said sculpture and finally implement the most promising ones. While the others worked on bringing games, calendars or the weather to the sculpture, I focussed on visualizing music.

After exploring the underlying hardware's limitations, I decided against depicting time-dependent highly accurate information. The naive approach of simply translating the well known equalizer frequency-level visualization would have proven virtually impossible, due to the slight but noticeable delay. Given, that humans are very good at noticing said delays, we collectively opted for a time-independent visualization.

Said visualization incorporates a static tube shape, that consists of an alternating pattern to form a circle and comparatively slowly changes depending on the frequency levels. Furthermore, a constant wave motion is applied, based on the currently played song's BPM. Lastly, the song's or album's cover art is translated as a color gradient to color the sculpture's spheres.