Before being introduced to TouchDesigner in my bachelor's coursework in 2021, I took advantage of After Effects' features to play with creating dynamic compositions relying on musical cues and triggers. I utilized experimental works from my ABS series, and other works to bring abstract visuals to life and tie them to music.
Currently I'm diving deeper into the Adobe Audition/Illustrator/After Effects pipeline to match different frequencies of a track up with different parts that I want to move, and using the waveform data to directly influence the animation.
In the post below, I divide up Kangding Ray's "Cercle" between its lowest bass beats and the stirring, swarm-like synths that slide up in short bursts. The pulsating of the rings matches up with the bass beats, and the synths correspond with the color shifts.
These small experiments built the groundwork for me to make a larger After Effects project that uses multiple parts in a full composition to visualize a full music piece. In the future I plan to use programs such as TouchDesigner that I can use to generate real-time animations in a composition with real-time performed music.
