RETINA RAVE
This is what it sees.
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 dancing: the bass shoves the cage round, the rhythm runs in beads along its edges, and the twelve keys are its colours.
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.