As many of you know, I’ve been spending a bit of my time exploring the cool features in ActionScript 3.0 - some new, some not. Lately, I’ve been intrigued by the SoundMixer class which has a special method, computeSpectrum(), that essentially takes a snapshot of the wave of a streaming sound (or an embeded sound, but I’m talkin’ 100% code here)…

The finer details quickly boil down to binary data, but the power of this is the potential to create audio-powered animations in Flash.

After a refresher in Trigonometry, some tortellini, and a late night (or early morning), I’m pleased to present latest ActionScript 3 experiment!

The variables controlled by the audio are the line thickness, line length and line color. I encourage you to watch for a while - it gets quite a bit more dramatic - you even start seeing some yellows and blues.

I considered adding a function to click and stop the sound. This would show the animation without the influence of the streaming audio, but I figured then most people would view the experiment for maybe 10 seconds before closing the window.

If you let it run for about 5 minutes, you’ll see what the animation looks like when it’s NOT under the influence. Plus, when you watch for a while, you just kind of get sucked in. For those readers who are runners, it’s a lot like running on a railroad track and staring at the tiles below - you instantly get tunnel vision. Check it out!

(don’t worry, they were exempt railroad lines )

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:16 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.