live simulation · field.sim
seed 0x6C09D4F5
seed 0x6C09D4F5
crt pass · scanline 3px · vignette on
Synesthesia FM
2025Stablevibe 76%0x6C09D4F5
A radio you can see. Live audio is decomposed into thirty-two bands and each band becomes a force on a velocity field, rendered as one continuous surface. Loud is not bright — loud is dense. The result is a weather map of the sound rather than a picture of it.
“stop drawing the spectrum. simulate a fluid that the spectrum is pushing. loud is not bright, loud is dense. i want weather, not a bar chart.▮
TWEAKparameters — the stage obeys in real time
Gestation
9days
Prompts cast
141
Tokens burned
1.6M
audio → field
11ms
v0.132-band bar chart (deleted the same evening)
v0.7bars become forces · fluid solver at 64²
v1.2128² dual buffer · 11 ms audio-to-field
v2.0current · half-res fallback exists and shames me
Substrate
Web AudioWebGLp5.jsGLSL
Register
Uptime96 d
Bands32
Solver128² × 2
Latency11 ms
R&DResearch log
I have no synesthesia and I am mildly envious of the people who do. Every audio visualiser I could find was a bar chart wearing a costume. I wanted the sound to have weather: pressure, fronts, accumulation, clearing.
Nine days, and only one prompt moved anything — the incantation above, typed in some frustration on day four. Once the bands became forces on a field instead of heights on a graph, the piece worked inside an hour. Everything before that was decoration.
It is useless as an analysis tool, which is the correct outcome. You cannot read frequency content off it. What you can read is the shape of an arrangement — where density arrives, where it clears. Two people have told me it is the first time they understood what a producer means by "space".
The solver drops to half resolution on anything without a discrete GPU, and at half resolution the fronts lose their edge and it becomes exactly the bar chart in a costume I was trying to avoid. There is no graceful degradation here. There is a good version and a pointless one.