Since 2008, a lot of my artistic output has been in the form of audio-reactive visual systems: I assert that music should be compelling visually as it is aurally. Initially, I became interested in reactive audio animation through the inspiring hand-animated works of Norman McClaren and Oskar Fishinger. Over the years, I've taken songs by my some of my favorite electronic musicians and essentially created music videos for them. The animation in these videos is powered by features -- like BPM -- derived from a real-time FFT analysis. This reactive data is often visually mapped through particle or fluid systems by either custom or open-source libraries in Processing or C++. If anything, these videos are an example of the incredibly expressive potential of computational art.

My favorite tools in this process are Processing (as a sketching environment), openFrameworks, Cinder, and OpenCL. I've written my own feature analysis system in C++ which helps in the realization of new works. My preferred library for FFT analysis is FFTW. In January 2012, I'll be teaching a one week intensive at CalArts about the history of audio reactive visuals and a corresponding workshop using Processing to design audio reactive animations.