At the meeting point of physics simulation, 3D visualization, and modular audio inside Unreal Engine, there’s Arthurs Audio BPs. And they just keep getting better – not just doing interesting visual stuff with sound, but making it low-latency.
Check out Arthur’s video posted today, which makes left/right split visualization. (There’s a demo project to download, too):
Also today, want to visualize a full spectrum, and use Niagra for elegant, next-generation particle-based motion effects? You can:
(No complaints about visuals there – it’s a demo/template. Niagra is insanely deep, so you could warp this into just about anything.)
This opens up more than just audio-synced eye candy. By patching together the deep modular sound toolkit inside Unreal with the visual physics interface of the same, Arthur is making some new synesthesia-fueled fantasies of how music interfaces can work.
For an example from January:
Check out everything on GitHub, which fairly recently made its way into full audiovisual plug-in form. It splines, it visualizes, it does submixes, it makes effects and modulation. You could make game jams with a fox; you could do spatializations in a box. You could use it in performances here or there; you could use ArthursAudioBPs for augmented reality everywhere.
https://github.com/ArthurBarthur/ArthursAudioBPs
And part of what makes it cool is the underlying audio engine in Unreal. That modular synth environment is an under-utilized gem – truly one of the wonders of modern software. It’s the work of a great team at Epic led by Aaron McLeran, who – actually, whether Aaron totally realizes his full role in this or not, also influenced the embeddable versions of Pure Data, partly traceable to a walk he and I took on a California beach, back when he was still working on Spore as I recall.
For some history on that, here’s a 2016 kick-off event unveiling a lot of those features (and a lot has happened in the half-decade since – they’ve updated links in the notes on YouTube):
But I post this partly because I’m curious who else out there has ideas around this stuff, as I’d definitely rather play with this than a lot of other new tech out there.
The project is on Discord, so let’s go say hello: https://discord.gg/dKAshs7
And it’s Patreon-backed. This one looks well worth your support:
https://www.patreon.com/arthurbarthur