Make a visual that pulses to your music

Steps

1. Choose Help > Browse Demos..., type bokeh in the search box and open Drifting Bokeh Field. It plays at once: soft circles of light drift over a dark vignette.

2. Find your song in Finder or File Explorer and drag it onto the canvas below the viewport. A sound node, Audio file 1, appears. Click it, and the viewport shows the song as it plays: the left channel in red, the right in green.

   

3. Along the top of the viewport, open Send to and choose Play on speakers, so you hear the song while you work.

4. Open Send to again, point at Values and choose Loudness. A node that follows how loud the song is joins the graph.

   

5. Go back to the picture. In the Objects panel, click bokeh. The viewport shows the circles again, with a small stepper at the top: vig (4 of 4). Click its left arrow twice to step back to drift (2 of 4), the step that moves and zooms the picture.

6. In Properties, type uniform in the filter box. Right-click Uniform scale and choose Drive from a port.... Type rms in the list's search box and click rms_linear under RMS_Linear. Uniform scale turns amber: it now follows the song.

   

7. A song's loudness is a small number, around 0.05 to 0.3, so the picture shrinks at first. Click the ... button on the chip beside the amber setting and choose Fit range.... Set From to 0.05 and 0.3, set To to 1.2 and 1.8, and click Apply. Now the field zooms in on every loud beat and eases back between them.

   

8. Press F1, or choose View > Perform Mode. The editor steps aside and the bokeh fills the window, pulsing with the music. On a Mac laptop, hold Fn as you press F1.

9. Press Esc to come back to the editor. To show it on a projector or a second screen, choose Window > Outputs... and pick that screen under Display in the perform window settings, then press F1 again.