NEO HYPERION

Audio visualisation collapses into cliché the moment it becomes literal. Bars, rings and pulses read as decoration. The problem was to make sound legible as an environment — something that has terrain and weather rather than a waveform.

Decompose the signal into frequency bands and assign each band a physical consequence instead of a graphic. Bass displaces geometry, mid-range drives light temperature, transients trigger fracture, and silence is not empty — it becomes fog, drift and cooling.

The visitor steers a camera path through terrain that is being generated by whatever is playing. Because the mapping is physical rather than decorative, the same track twice never produces the same route: the system remembers energy over time, so the world carries the history of the performance.

Almost monochrome. Colour is earned by intensity, never applied for variety, so a loud passage is the only thing in the frame that is allowed to be bright. Motion easing is deliberately slow against fast audio to keep the piece cinematic instead of frantic.

• Web Audio API with FFT band decomposition and temporal smoothing
• Custom GLSL vertex displacement and emissive shading
• GPU particle systems driven by transient detection
• Deterministic seeding so a session can be replayed exactly

• Signal studies — mapping frequency bands to physical consequences
• Shader prototyping against recorded reference tracks
• Latency tuning so visual response reads as instantaneous
• Fallback mode for devices without audio permission or WebGL2

A system that behaves like an instrument rather than a plugin: it can be performed, it rewards restraint in the source material, and it degrades into a still, atmospheric state instead of breaking when the audio stops.

• Generative audio engine
• Audio-reactive shaders
• Live visuals system
• Interactive web experience