I was searching through old and new music visualizers in order to replace just having the album cover play on YouTube for the album, Synemotion.

One next-gen 3-d music visualizer has pretty interesting effects and that was APEXvj. It might be that the graphics are so well done or the algorithm, the Finnish programmer, Simo Santavirta used. But it seems he found a “way to detect these rewarding moments in a song and to use them to add visually stimulating components at the right time.”

As he states on his website:

“According to several studies, when you listen to music your brain is wired into an anticipation-reward mode. It’s sort of like humming a song and waiting for specific sound patterns to emerge.

When they do, or even better, when an unexpected pattern surprises you in a positive way, your body rewards you by producing dopamine. Dopamine makes us happy, creative and motivated!

The intended result is to strengthen the dopamine producing effect when we experience music.”

His technology is browser based using WebGL in Chrome and it was very easy to test out the songs because the development uses the Soundcloud API.

It was quite difficult to get the visuals into a video. But, of course this app is not for making videos but for “real-time” VJing or live performance.

With a few trials and errors and quite a few capture software programs, I believe this is a somewhat satisfactory result, at least something for your eyes as well as your ears.

Here are the videos from YouTube: