Contest ended little bit more then a month ago and I ended up a winner. There are some other nice entries there too. And here is mine
This is little post on how things went for me and some code sharing trough wonderfl.net site.
Music Spectrum Circles
I wrote about first experiments with spectrum in my second post about this contest and exploration. Click on images to see wonderfl.net versions with source code. There is not much more to say about it then what I already said in that post. Simple, yet pretty cool 
Trails of Music
After that I turned to sound signal itself. Was pretty pleased with results that ended up in my new year “postcard” With flaws but looked good.
Initially I was planing to make something more interactive where each user could add his actions along with music to get interesting results. Something like musical brush. After making some experiments with sound signal my view started to change a little. Allowing other people to express some creativity is cool but exploring what kind of experience what song provides with visualizer + ability to replay that and share exactly same view with friends is equally important. Here I started to think that making visualizer so that it is same visualization for same song each time for any user is a good idea too. That way people could listen trough various songs and share names of those that looked especially cool so that others could see it too.
Music Atom
At that point I started to try to make my final entry of musical brush. But after some time I figured that I will not be able to do anything spectacular in time I had left till the end of the contest. Still I made few experiments using that concept and along the way made a step forward with musical signal. Thing I did was to use FFT class from SION library to get original signal spectrum, break it to as many sub segments I needed and then, using reverse FFT, get smaller separate signals in different frequency ranges. This way I hoped to get two things. More separate entities that react to music + parts of visualization that reacted to different parts of sound. First worked perfectly and second… Well depends on the song.
In the end I gave up on brush idea and turned to playing around lines again. There were few things I did not like about Trails of Music and Musical Fireworks. Main problem was that line traveling around could end up near corners of the view. Also it all did not had any distinct form. Ideas to fix it were simple. Try some techniques that will make it not go too far from center of screen. Easiest ways were to just change coordinate system. Like apply Sin/Cos functions to lines coordinates so that they “bounce” elastically from corners of the screen. Looked not so well to be honest. Another similar thing would be polar coordinates and this one worked brilliantly. It made beams to inside a sphere which looked cool, it also made trajectories more interesting (like flowers). It also made amount of beams different for different parts of screen. They would spend more time traveling at sphere edge + they would far more often cross center of the sphere. Along with additive blend mode and smooth beam color change it made for a brilliant pictures.
The End
And so that’s it. I must say I had much of fun and learned thing or two during those two months and have plans to play with those things further in various ways. Hope you found it fun too and found code interesting and useful too
