Smooshy

Watch Smooshy live in the browser

A screen full of soft, swirling colour that stretches and folds like warm wax or oil on water. Large slow eddies carry small curls inside them, and the hues shift gently between saturated and pale tones.

The image is a field of colour phases moved along by a flow, in the style of a Synesthesia shader. The flow is built at eight scales at once, from half resolution down to a few dozen cells across, each scale computed from the one below it, so the motion has structure at every size. Colours are chosen in a perceptual colour space, which keeps their brightness even as hues change.

What it reacts to

• Treble: drives the finest curls of the flow
• Bass hits: drive the largest swirls and make the whole flow move faster
• Mids: richer, more varied colour and a change in the spacing between scales
• High-frequency presence: speeds up colour rotation and adds sparkling ripples
• Overall loudness: sets the overall flow speed and colour drift

Music that suits it

Textured, evolving music with both deep drums and busy hi-hats, such as IDM, breakbeat or jazz, works the large swirls and the fine curls at the same time.

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