Most cultures independently developed various forms of instruments and distinctive chanting rituals. It seems as music, singing and chanting is an integral part of humanity. Consequentially, music is a core element of human identity. Today one can observe strong social implications, as many people strongly identify themselves with the type of music they listen to. Even though there are different levels of attachment towards music or specific genre, yet, it appears as music plays a major role in our lives.

CIRCULARIS is a real-time music visualisation, which tries to discover more semantic depth within the composition of a song. One can clearly discover the dramaturgic structure of a song, as slower and calmer passages, as well as louder and multifaceted parts of the song, are being revealed. Homogeneity of the visualisation parameters allow for comparability between songs, or even between artists and entire albums.

Through a fast Fourier transform (FFT) signals from the sound file are converted into a representation of the frequency domain. Information about the frequencies allows for an analysis of the frequency spectrum, through which one can identify different frequency bands such as the bass, mids, and high frequencies. Those parameters are being used to determine the size, position, stroke width and colour of the circles drawn in CIRCULARIS.

I chose to develop a music visualisation as I'm really drawn towards music in my personal life. CIRCULARIS is my first vvvv project. Using vvvv was helpful in this context, as it provided all the necessary nodes to create a music project of this kind. It also features profound music analysis nodes which I've used for CIRCULARIS. The song in the video is "Odyseey" performed by Dream Koala.