Done with Quartz Composer with the intention of replicating the appearance of a Fractal Flame rendered through Scott Draves’ Flam3, except live rendered based on audio input.
This isn’t a fractal, but I think it does re-create the appearance quite well.
The video quality isn’t even close to the live render quality, but it gives you a good idea of it.
The screen recording here has taken the mic input and used it for the animation. The song used in this recording is “August (Reggae Rework)” by el-B from http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 License.
You can download the Quartz file here, note though that while this will open in Tiger, it will not render correctly, OS X 10.5 Leopard is required for it to run correctly.
It should also be noted that the video above was rendered on a Macbook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz with 2gb of RAM and an 8600m GT and it averages 5 frames per second, so to really experience the full potential of this, it needs to run on a Mac with a fairly powerful video card like a Mac Pro, the iMac’s and new Macbook Pro’s should also render it quite nicely.
The reason it is so intensive is because there are a number of iterator and replicate in space patches along with LFO’s and interpolator’s that are affected by both the audio volume peak and the audio spectrum, so depending on the volume and the type of music, the visualisation develops more variation.
Tags: Audio, audio spectrum, computational arts, Fractal, LFO, Mac, Quartz Composer, Scott Draves, visualisation
