RETINA RAVE
Hi, I'm Toma. I like music and math and built this for fun.
Retina Rave is a music visualizer that runs in your browser. It listens to whatever you are playing and steers a camera through real mathematical objects: the shapes on screen are not drawn to look mathematical, they are the mathematics, computed live. Beats, drops and sections are detected as they happen, and a director picks the scene, remembers what each part of the track looked like, and crossfades between them. Nothing is random and nothing runs on a clock: every motion on screen traces back to the music.
The scenes
- NAV — a walk over the Mandelbrot set's multiplier chart; each point the camera visits is a Julia set, and the music decides where it goes.
- FEIGEN — a dive down the Feigenbaum period-doubling cascade, the road of ever-smaller copies along the real axis of the Mandelbrot set.
- DUST — a swarm of particles in a flow field, with the fibres of the Hopf fibration threaded through it.
- MANDALA — a box-fold fractal seen through a kaleidoscope.
- TORUS — the Hopf fibration itself: circles on the three-dimensional sphere, projected down to where we can see them.
- POLYTOPE — the regular four-dimensional polytopes, turning on the 3-sphere and cast into three dimensions.
Support
It is free and there are no ads. If it made your night better, a tip helps cover hosting and adding new scenes.
Follow
Clips and new scenes land here first.
How to use it
On a computer: play music in another browser tab, open retinarave.com, press Share a tab and pick that tab with its audio. Press ? at any time and the machine explains what you are looking at and what is moving it. On a phone: put the music on a speaker and let the page listen with the microphone.
Retina Rave · a zero-dependency WebGL2 engine, native modules, no framework.