VIZZI · a visual lab
See what you are
listening to.
Point it at your microphone, drop a track onto it, or run the bench tone, and it draws what it hears — a triggered oscilloscope and a vectorscope, an eye diagram that tells a note from a noise, contour maps and metaballs, a cellular automaton whose rule is the spectrum itself, a VU meter built to the ANSI ballistics, a step grid that transcribes the groove. Twenty-five of them: one filling the screen, four, or nine at once, with an FX stack over the top and ten slots that each hold an entire desk.
Every frame is computed from the sound in the room. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is fetched, and the microphone reaches the meter and stops there — it is never routed to your speakers, which is how a visualiser avoids howling in a room with the volume up.
The stage
Give it something to listen to.
VIZZI
nothing playing
FX
Click any tile to change what it is drawing; alt-click to go back. 1 4 9 set the stage, ← → walk the modes, F is fullscreen and space stops and starts — so it can be run from across a room. The ten save keys hold a whole desk each: press one to recall it, shift and a digit to store the desk into it.
The deck
Shape what the modes are fed.
Drop a track on the stage and this comes alive. The analyser sits at the END of this chain, so every control here changes the picture as well as the sound — push the low shelf and the modes that follow the bass grow; close the filter and the ones that follow the treble go quiet. Pitch and speed are separate controls, because a file is decoded into a buffer rather than played through an element.
Deck
nothing loaded
Nothing loaded yet
Drop a track on the stage above, or press the bench tone
Tone
Flat — the three filters are at unity across the band
Space
Platter
Moves the pitch and leaves the tempo alone.
Moves the tempo and takes the pitch with it, the way a platter does.
Anything the browser can decode — MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, Opus. The file is decoded in this page and never leaves it. Every control ramps rather than steps, because a jump in a filter coefficient is a click you can hear and a spike every mode draws.
The modes
What it can draw, and what drives it.
Every mode is handed the same reading of the sound — the waveform, the spectrum, eight bands from sub to air, the loudness, a beat flag and where the energy is sitting — and decides for itself what to do with it. They are listed here with the part of the signal each one actually follows, because “reacts to music” is what everything claims and nothing explains.
Method
One analysis, many pictures.
What is measured
A single analyser at 2048 samples, read once a frame. From it: the raw waveform, 1,024 frequency bins, eight bands spaced logarithmically because hearing is logarithmic, the RMS level, the loudest sample, a spectral centroid for “brightness”, and a beat.
The beat is energy-over-history: the sub-band energy against the mean of the last second and a half, with a floor so silence cannot ring it and a refractory period so one kick is one beat rather than four. It is not a musical downbeat and does not claim to be. The tempo shown is the median gap between the last nine of them.
Nine at once, one FFT
Every mode on the stage is given the same reading. Nine tiles is nine draws and one analysis — an analyser per tile would be nine transforms of the same signal producing nine identical answers.
On paper
This page has a paper edition, which is the hard case for a visualiser: on black a white line is the loudest thing on the screen, and on white it is invisible. Every colour a mode produces passes through the estate’s ink function, which keeps the hue and the alpha, moves the lightness into the ink range, and inverts greys and whites. Additive glow is switched to ordinary compositing there too, because “lighter” on white saturates to white and erases the mode it was meant to make glow.
What it does not do
It does not record, upload or keep anything. The microphone is connected to the analyser and to nothing else — not to your speakers, which is how a visualiser avoids feeding back in a room with the volume up. A dropped file is read by the page and never leaves it. There is no server here to send it to.