Continuing the theme of VuMeters, this proof of concept is the start of an ongoing project to create a fun, interactive stop-motion VuMeter. This non-interactive example is pretty simple, with a stack of sugar cubes responding to the low end of the audio spectrum. Ideally I would like to have a lot of stacks, integrated with other stop-motion design elements, as well as some realtime footage composited in. The music is Flack Su - T-Break (Beta Remix). The napping feline is our cat MIDI

Working on sliced up video for the VideoVuMeter reminded me of some videos I had seen a while back that demonstrated time distorted videos. The most remarkable examples are from the Khronos Projector research group, who have done many studies into the concept. One of the simplest implementations of this idea is to give a temporal delay to the slices of video, which results in fun time twisting distortion effects. And though I’d seen After Effects pre-rendered videos of this effect, I hadn’t come across a realtime Flash version. So here’s my first crack at it. I recommend waving your arms around :)

Since I’ve never tried monkeying with computeSpectrum to analyze audio data, I figured that would be a fun place to start before launching into the Flash Player 10 dynamic audio APIs. I applied the ‘vumeter’ effect to a song’s music video, slicing the frames into vertical strips and shifting them based on the amplitude of the frequency. The shifting amount is variable based on mouse Y position. This looked nice when applied to videos with a main focal image and a plain background, on my wife’s suggestion I wound up using the song Colors by Utada Hikaru, Japan’s favorite Tetris playing pop star.