History
The first electronic music visualizer was the Atari Video Music introduced by Atari Inc. in 1976, and designed by the initiator of the home version of Pong, Robert Brown. The idea was to create a visual exploration that could be implemented into a Hi-Fi stereo system. It is described in US 4081829 . Music visualisation was first pioneered in Great Britain by Fred Judd.
Music and audio players were available on early home computers, Sound to Light Generator (1985, Infinite Software) used the ZX Spectrum's cassette player for example. The 1984 movie Electric Dreams prominently made use of one, although as a pre-generated effect, rather than calculated in real-time. One of the first modern music visualization programs was the open-source, multi-platform Cthugha (1994). Subsequently, computer music visualisation became widespread in the mid to late 1990s as applications such as Winamp (1997), Audion (1999), and SoundJam (2000). By 1999, there were several dozen freeware non-trivial music visualizers in distribution.
In particular, MilkDrop by Ryan Geiss, G-Force by Andy O'Meara, and Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS) by Nullsoft became popular music visualizations. AVS is part of Winamp and has been recently open-sourced, and G-Force was licensed for use in iTunes and Windows Media Center and is presently the flagship product for Andy O'Meara's software startup company, SoundSpectrum. The real distinction between music visualization programs such as Geiss' MilkDrop and other forms of music visualization such as music videos or a laser lighting display is the visualization programs' ability to create different visualizations for each song every time the program is run.
Read more about this topic: Music Visualization
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