Rhythm Elements

This is an idea I've been thinking about since Markov Contact. One of the things I really liked about that project was the way the animations worked. The pulsing star for the current node was, in some sense, a function of the speed and intensity of the beat. The starfield, similarly, was meant to be a pure function of some initial randomness and the current position in the song.

I think the idea of functional animation in general has significant merit. Making your visualisation a pure function of some initial state and a small number of musical parameters makes it very easy to reason about, and also makes it generic across different songs and even different ways of determining those musical parameters. Once I got used to thinking "how do values in the music correspond to things on the screen" instead of "where should this move next frame" it actually started to feel more natural.

With a bit more work, I think it'd be possible to build up a library of these animations, dancing figures, bouncing objects, pulsing flares and lights, all using functional animation. You could take these rhythm elements, compose them together, and use them to build an entire animated musical scene. I think that could look pretty incredible, and not be anywhere as difficult as animating from scratch.