Quadtree

Watch Quadtree live in the browser

A canvas in the style of Piet Mondrian's late paintings: cream ground, black lines, and squares filled with red, yellow and blue. The grid is never fixed. Some corners break up into a fine mosaic of small squares while others relax into a few large, calm planes.

The screen is a quadtree: each square splits into four wherever the music's "detail field" is strong enough, up to seven levels deep. That field comes from sixteen soft sources, one per pair of spectrum bands, drifting slowly across the canvas, plus a hot spot that every kick throws to a random place. Lines get thinner the deeper the split, and now and then a small square is painted solid black.

What it reacts to

• Loud frequency bands: the part of the canvas near their source shatters into smaller squares
• Kick drum: a fresh patch of fine subdivision appears at a random spot and fades
• Each square listens to one band and fills with colour when that band is relatively loud: bass leans red, mids yellow, treble blue
• Snare: a few scattered squares blink to their colour
• Bass pulses: the black lines thicken slightly

Tune

Detail sets how readily squares split, and Canvas and Lines change the ground and line colours.

Music that suits it

Busy, rhythmic music with a lot of movement across the spectrum, such as jazz, funk or boogie-woogie piano, keeps the grid restless and well coloured.

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 Quadtree in the WebGL presets, or press ← → on the page until it comes up.