Hi everyone, I’m putting together some visuals for a Symphony performance, and would like to add some ‘lights’ that react to the sound. VDMX is great but I’m still learning, so would appreciate any advice on how best to do this. It seems much of this could be done with Audio Analyzers and other components, but I need it to be really quick and efficient so my guess is I need to hire someone to write a custom shader that does it all. What do you think? All thoughts welcome.
After doing some prototyping I’m pretty convinced I can do the detection and processing in VDMX efficiently, so all the ISF shader would need to do is draw the lights based on the intensity and color values I’d send. Anyone interested in writing such a shader? I have a modest budget My guess is it could be pretty easy for anyone who knew what they were doing. See the doc for a description, but it would look like this:
This will be for live symphony performance which gives me some advantages: I’ll have four widely separated microphones tied to their own sets of ‘lights’. That separation alone should help them reflect the musical performance. And some quick tests with Audio Analysis suggests that driving lights by frequency could work pretty well, and FFT should do better, I imagine.
The shader is now working well (thanks Howie) so we now turn to the task of making them react to incoming audio signals.
My guess is that FFT might do a better job at isolating instruments than narrow filters? The hope is to produce something that clearly follows the music. Initial tests with damping are promising but there’s a long way to go.
As VDMX has Audio Analysis features I bet many people have done similar projects before. Anyone have insights they’d care to share?
My guess is it could be pretty easy for anyone who knew what they were doing. See the doc for a description, but it would look like this: