Music Visualizer: GPU visuals for whatever you're playing

Music Visualizer

Ten hand-built GPU worlds that react to every part of whatever you're playing: the kick, the snare, the hi-hats, the tempo, and the drop.

Free and open source (MIT). Windows 10/11 · Chrome / Edge with WebGPU.

Ten worlds, all shaders

Every look is a single WGSL fragment shader running on your GPU, about half a millisecond a frame. They stay full of detail even at 4K full screen.

Bass Drop

A club for heavy bass. The woofer pumps with the sub, lasers and moving heads cut through haze, and the crowd jumps on the beat.

Ferrofluid

Glossy magnetic liquid on a mirror floor. The spectrum spikes out of it, field lines spin, and iron filings stand up with the bass.

Data Bus

Negative line art: fly down a data tunnel over a wireframe city. Viruses get deleted on the kick, and a bitstream worm lunges on the drop.

Pulse Ring

A reactor core: a spectrum crown, a ring drawn from the real waveform, spinning arc rings, a particle vortex and shockwaves.

Neon Horizon

Synthwave. Mountains are built from the last few seconds of music. Includes a striped sun, a racing grid, a car, palms and VHS.

Reef Arcade

Pixel art. The coral is the spectrum, a diver spears lionfish on the beat, and a boss shows up on the drop. The score counts the beats.

Deep Wreck

An ocean liner on the sea floor. Its portholes are the spectrum, and sonar pings land on the beat. A diver's torch, a whale and jellyfish fill the water.

Moonlight Piano

A night lake under the moon. The keyboard lights up the notes actually being played, and each one ripples across the water.

Aurora

Northern lights over snowy peaks and a mirror lake. Each curtain follows its own band of the music, and a wolf howls on the drop.

Classic Bars

A hi-fi rack: LED spectrum analyser with peak hold, twin VU meters, a phosphor scope and seven-segment readouts.

Not just "louder = bigger"

A real-time analyzer splits the music into separate signals, and every look gives each one its own job.

Kick · snare · hi-hatSeparate onset detectors with adaptive thresholds, so a snare can flash the lights while the kick punches the camera.

Tempo & beat phaseA tempo tracker knows where you are inside each beat, so motion lands on the beat instead of after it.

The dropDetects the bass slamming back after a break-down and triggers shockwaves, strobes and boss fights.

Piano notesAn 8192-point FFT picks out the 88 keys, so the moonlit keyboard plays along with real piano.

Energy & brightnessQuiet verse or huge chorus, dark sub or airy treble: the scene changes how much is lit and what colour it is.

History & waveformThe last 3.2 seconds of spectrum and the raw waveform drive mountains, echoes and oscilloscope rings.

One shader set, two runtimes

Windows app in Rust on wgpu / DirectX 12: a single 5 MB exe that lives in the tray, docks anywhere, snaps to edges and goes full screen.
System audio via WASAPI loopback, so it hears whatever your PC plays, with no virtual cables.
Glass UI on the GPU: frosted backdrop blur, gloss and a rim that glints on the beat. The look recolours itself from the current song's album art.
Chrome extension on WebGPU, running the same WGSL files, with tab capture.
Low latency: one frame in flight, so the visuals land on the sound. It runs at below-normal priority, so your games always come first.

~0.5 msper frame, per look

10shader worlds

5 MBsingle exe

// shaders/looks/my_look.wgsl: a whole look
// name: My Look
// palette: #ff2fa6 #8a3cff #22e0ff

fn look(fc: vec2f) -> vec4f {
    let p = centered(fc);
    let r = 0.35 + 0.25 * G.kick       // punch on the kick
          + 0.1 * spec(fract(atan2(p.y, p.x) / TAU));
    var col = pal(G.beat_phase) * glow(abs(length(p) - r), 0.02);
    col += vec3f(G.drop) * 0.3;        // flash on the drop
    return vec4f(col, 1.0);
}