Brainwave

Brainwave started as a question I had, inspired by my dad's interest in visualizers (as a musician). I wondered: what would it look like if you could actually see how your brain responds to music as the visualizer, as its responding? I wanted to built something that was visually interesting and had real meaning, not just bouncing bars to the beat. The piece I'm submitting visualizes a single neuron, simulating what it would be doing in your brain as you are listening to the song (either the default or the one you uploaded). Because I wanted it to be based on a system, where each aspect of the music causes a visual change, it isn't 100% accurate to what is happening exactly in your brain (that would be far too complex). But, its a good representation of the main events that are happening. The center sphere is the soma, the branches and axons are the axons and dendrites, and the traveling orbs are action potentials (the electrical impulses that fire when a neuron activates). The kick drum drives the scale of the neuron. The bass drives the rotation speed. The mid frequencies control how often and how many orbs fire. The color palette evolves based on beat events detected in the bass and upper mid frequencies. The biggest takeaway for me was just how much the mapping decisions matter. Getting the visuals to feel musically responsive rather than just reacting to the volume took lots of iteration. I played around with isolating specific frequency ranges, turning smoothing curves, getting thresholds for each level of the music using a visual FFT analyzer asset claude helped me create. It took a lot of work, but I'm proud to say that the result is something that responds to the structure of the music, not just the volume.