Why I made this
Fred Again kinda got me through Covid. I was feeling super down and going through a lot. Fred showed up and his music really lifted me up and kept me in the game. The world was shut down but my creative mind never stopped. This experiment is an ode to audio reactive experiences, something I really love to play with.
How it works
- One WebGL2 fragment shader, written by hand. No three.js, no textures. The whole field is math.
- Domain-warped noise, snapped to a pixel grid, dithered through an 8×8 Bayer matrix, then posterized along the palette ramp. Quantize per colour channel instead and everything drags toward grey.
- The field is cut into horizontal bands, each on its own clock. Sampling it at a displaced coordinate is what tears it apart.
- YouTube’s player is a black box. Cross-origin, so the page can’t read its audio. The sound gets caught on the way out instead: tab audio where Chromium allows it, the microphone otherwise.
- An FFT reads that signal, and its energy is what pulls the bands back into register. The drop is where the field comes together.
- Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere. The audio never leaves your tab.