Spatial Music Visualizer

by Paul Cohen | Sep 10, 2017 | 0 comments

Inside Music is a Google WebVR Experiment that lets you step inside a song, giving you a closer look at how music is made. The bonus is the music is spatialized as well so you get a completely different audio experience from a normal stereo mix.

Open the Song Visualizer in a new tab: https://sonicviz.gitlab.io/sonicviz-spatial-music/
You can move around using the WASD keys and mouse, just like a regular game controller mode.
Note: Best used with Google Chrome browser with no other tabs open.

“Interaction
Select a song from the menu. The stems of the song will appear in a circle around you, each represented by a sphere. In 360 Mode, tap the spheres to turn them on or off. In VR Mode, you can use your controller to toggle their state. On Google Cardboard, you will have a retical (a small circle in front of you eye) which can be used to turn the stems on and off.”

I thought it would be a good opportunity to pull apart and test it with a couple of my own songs:

There’s huge potential with spatial music to revolutionize music production and delivery, and we’re only just getting started. For some more info on this you can read my blog post on “Immersive Audio and Musical AI“.

There’s a bit of a process to go through, including configuring your development workflow and tools but in the end it’s a pretty cool way of getting inside the music. I also used it as an opportunity to test gitlab CI and page hosting.

Next step will be to extend it with some custom visualizations, refine the asset pipeline workflow. I’ve actually had a similar concept bouncing around to do in Unity3D so I’ll probably do that at some point.

See also: https://www.canvas.co.com/creations/3901