Your Country Never Sounded So Good

1. Install OpenFrameworks using their platform-specific guides.
2. Create a new project using the project generator for your platform.
3. Copy the contents of the src folder to your project source folder.
4. The tricky part: download and link the FFTW library with your project.
5. Check that the FFTW variant is based on single-precision floating point.
6. Make sure that the src/beat folder is in the compiler search path.
7. Hit compile and pray to the many gods of cross-platform support.

Screenshots are available here. Suggestions or pull requests are very welcome. The portal consists of the waveform on the wall, the time-varying FFT as bands, and color accents on beats.

Most of the features in my program were pretty unintended. This project was my first serious foray into computer graphics, so I sort of tinkered with stuff until it looked good. Often times, this approach was somewhat frustrating, but I think I ended up learning a lot about how to draw the things you want to draw. As for the theme of the visualizer, I'll let it speak for itself. That was also sort of an accident.

My roommates Sam Garcia and Cameron Steinfeld helped me judge the trippyness of my visualizer as I went through the creative process and journeyed toward the motherland. Thanks as well to the ofxBeat library for providing a beat detection algorithm.