I have also been thinking through other interactions/visualizations to test out new forms of understanding music, soundscapes and making. For the time being I have developed some sound reactive particle systems, that add a cosmic experience and another form of seeing, feeling and understanding the sound around you.
The first being a sound reactive cosmic shower, a zone where you are surrounded by shooting stars, traveling past you the particles shine and trail off. Bringing a real depth to the space, urging you through their shooting rays, in some ways replicating rain or the movements of a fluid body, in any means its kinetic nature encourages you to play within its movements. The particles are driven by the audio listener feed in unity and as the sound level increases and decreases it controls the number of particles emitted. At the moment this is quite a simple behavior, but I do like how it changes the feel and dynamic of the space, encouraging different interactions within it and allowing you to see the sound you hear around you in real time.
After this I was thinking about a more sculptural particle system that could sit within the scene and be seen from a far as a whole or explored within. I created a sound reactive solar flare effect that shoots particles in an organic stream through the scene. The script I wrote for the particle attractors uses a vector of points to attract the particles, these points are randomly generated every time it is run and so form unlimited interesting formations. The particle system itself runs with noise to make the movement more fluid, I also found this was achieved through setting the force of the attractors to the right amount. The sound reactive nature of this system is through the audio listener in the unity scene as well, similarly to the cosmic shower it controls the amount of particles emitted but in this more tighter formation with linear progression it creates a very different visualization of the sound. The audio level also controls the strength of the attractors, so defines how slim and defined the path of particles is, the louder the sound the tighter their movements between attractors, the quieter the less affected the particles are by them. It really forms a great visualizer for the movement of the sound, creating subtle and intricate indications of where you are and have been in sound.
I have also been thinking of leaving arbitrary looking objects/controllers in the space that can control and configure the scene/visualizations in the scene. From background color change to altering the formations of the particles to the unthought of, but I have to say that I felt they were not directly linked to the function of sound making, or visualizations of the sound enough and if they did become realized this would have to be addressed.
George Simms 