Audio Terrain v2

Watch Audio Terrain v2 live in the browser

A tunnel of glowing lines flies toward a dark core in the centre of the screen. Its walls, six by default, are built from terrain profiles: each new ring is a mountain line made from the current sound, and older rings recede into the distance, leaving soft trails.

The height of each wall point has three parts: Perlin noise for a natural landscape, the normalized spectrum, with low frequencies in the middle of each wall and high ones toward its corners, and the waveform for fine jitter. The tunnel slowly rolls and twists along its depth, and in Color drift mode the hue wanders over time while the saturation follows the loudness.

What it reacts to

• Spectrum: raises the mountains on the walls, bass in the middle of each wall and treble toward the corners
• Waveform and treble: add fine jagged detail to each new profile
• Mids: make the noise landscape taller
• Bass hits and loudness: pulse the glow at the tunnel's core and brighten the lines
• Loudness (Color drift mode): sets the colour saturation, so quiet passages turn grey

Tune

Color chooses drifting or static colour; Randomize motion (on by default) varies the shape every six seconds, and with it off Wave height, Wave rate, Wall count, Camera spin, Depth twist and Trail glow set the tunnel by hand.

Music that suits it

Dense electronic music with a full spectrum, such as synthwave or trance, builds tall, varied walls, while sparse acoustic tracks give a calmer, lower tunnel.

How to play it

Install Deus, play music on Spotify, YouTube Music, Yandex Music or any other tab and click the Deus icon on that tab. Then pick Audio Terrain v2 in the Canvas presets, or press ← → on the page until it comes up.