What is Audio Visualization?

Music visualization, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and in a way synchronized with the music as it is played.

Books
Downloads
Experiments
Experiments Codepen
Libraries Audio
Libraries Visualization
People to Follow
Tutorials
Videos

Books

Web Audio API by Boris Smus

Downloads

Soundwhich
Beeple’s resource (inspirational C4D “open source” files)
Freesound
Audio Jungle
Six Bit Deep
Samplephonics - Free Stuff
Wave Alchemy
Audio Animals
Bed Room Producers Blog
Free Music Archive
Music Radar
How to Make Electronic Music Freebies
Motion Sound
Cava - A cross-platform terminal visualizer.

Experiments

Audible Visuals - Collection of visualizers derived from the Archimedean spiral by Sonia Boller.
React Player - A complete Audio Visualisation player with ReactJS.
Moire - A Web Audio / WebGL visualisation.
Finding Love - fully interactive, Virtual Reality story that transforms emotions into art.
Tangled - Audio-visual release by Berlin based netlabel Yarn Audio, visuals made in cables. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.
Luis Henrique Bizarro Portfolio - Portfolio with experiments using Three.JS and GSLS.
Adventure Machine - Campaign for Madeon’s “Adventure” album.
BBNG - WebGL Visualizer for “Confessions” (feat. Leland Whitty) by BADBADNOTGOOD.
Chrome Music Lab - Play with simple experiments and explore how music works.
DENNIS - An interactive and audio responsive music video for “Dennis” by popcorn_10’s.
Fluctus - Experimental 3D Audio Visualizer by Jordan Machado.
George & Jonathan III - Campaign for George & Jonathan’s “III” album.
Lantern - WebGL Visualizer for “Lantern” by SBTRKT.
Lines - Visualising Joy Division album cover as a music spectrum by Silvio Paganini.
Nero - WebGL Visualizer for “In The Way” by Nero.
Pareidolia - WebGL Visualizer for “Szerencsétlen” by Venetian Snares.
Splice - A realtime interactive music visualizer using time-code data from Splice’s upcoming visualizer API.
Typatone - Make music while you write.
Yume - Campaign for Helios’ “Yume” album.
Silk - 3D Audio Visualizer by Matt DesLauriers.
Wave - 3D Audio Visualizer by Matt DesLauriers.
Binaural - Experiment using Binaural and Reverb audio effects by Matt DesLauriers.
Word Problems - WebGL Visualizer for “Word Problems” by Harmonic 313.
Glitch - An algorithmic synthesizer to make music from math.
105 Birthday Clara Rockmore - A Doodle for the Birthday of Clara Rockmore.
Fireworks with WebGL - Sound driven fireworks by Ondřej Žára.
Glowsynth - just amazing! - Play with your mouse, Qwerty keyboad, or MIDI keyboard and watch as the lights dance to your music.
Mmorph - An adventure into new ways of delivering interactive music in the browser and beyond.
Loop Waveform Visualizer - WebGL Visualizer for Screw Base by Beytah.
Scrollsound - Scrolling as a method of interaction with audio on the web by Ehsan Ziya.
Experiment #8 - Music Experiment by Bruno Imbrizi.
Music Cube - A Chrome Experiment that combines the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine with the Rubik’s Cube.
Music Game - ECHO - A challenging musical puzzle game.
Patatap - A portable animation and sound kit.
Plink - Awesome Multiplayer Game - A multiplayer music experience.
Soundcloud Visualizer - A Canvas and Web Audio Experiment.
CSS Visualizer - Music Visualizers that are made entirely using DOM elements and CSS3.
Kandinski Experiment - Music Visualizations inspired in Kandinsky.
Visual Music Trailer - Live audio visual performance ideas.
Draw and Music - Campaign for Rugs new album by Sam Greens.
Moogfest Substrate - Experimental site to Moogfest.
3D Grid - Audio visualizer built with HTML5 web audio API by rickycodes.
obsidian - 3D Audio Visualization made by the creator of Three.js.
TRIF - GIF-based online radio visualization using webaudio API and raw CSS
Audiograph - Amazing audio visualization made by Matt DesLauriers.
Scribble Audio - Draw loops of sound with this web synthesizer.
Touchpianist - play a piano and look all animations along the screen.
PartyMode - An experimental music visualizer using d3.js and the web audio api.
DJi - Clean music visualizer from SoundCloud or self uploaded.
VR Ondes Martenot - A playable rendition of the Ondes Martenot in Virtual Reality.
Popcorn - Little audio-reactive sketch by Hugh Kennedy.
Musical Interactions - Some experimental ideas for playful musical interactions.
ClubberToy Several shadertoys, rewired with clubber, bundled as a vj app.
Andantino Listen some notes and try to find same notes on the keyboard.
Vissonance A collection of audio visualizers built in THREE.js.
ShowCQTBar - Audio spectrum visualization with musical scale.
Weekly Music Visualizations Weekly music visualization experiments built with Three.js and p5.js by Suraya Shivji.
Audio Visualizer - An interesting web audio visualizer built with Pixi.js.
YouTube Musical Spectrum - A browser extension that offers audio visualization on your YouTube page with nice musical notes.
Just Dance - A 3D Audio Visualization made with BabylonJS & 2D Perlin Noise.
audioMotion - High-resolution real-time audio spectrum analyzer and full-featured music player written in JavaScript. Includes binaries for Windows, Linux and macOS.
p5.js Audio Visualizer - A powerful, beat- and amplitude-responsive audio visualizer created with p5.sound, on an HTML5 Canvas by Amanda Yeh.

Experiments on Codepen

SVG Animated Drum Kit - Play an amazing Drum made with SVG and realistic sounds by @iamjoshellis.
SVG Animated Guitar - Play an amazing Guitar made with SVG and realistic sounds by @iamjoshellis.
Audio Visualizer - Abstract Audio Visualizer using Three.js by Francesco Trillini
Awesome Audio Player - Radial Audio Player constructed by lines of frequency and amplitude by Alex Permyakov
Wireframes - Wireframe WebGL Animation with Three.js by Patrick Heng
Soundcloud Vinyl Search - An amazing experiment creating a realistic Vinyl player using DrawSVG and GSAP by Chris Gannon.
Gooey Effect Audio - Upload your mp3 and visualize the song with this crazy effect by Jeremy Karlsson.
CSS Audio Visualizer - Using audio frequency data from a hidden video to apply CSS scaling by Neil McCallion.
Storytelling with Html5 + CSS3 - A great example of how to use music to create a Storytelling by Rachel Nabors.
Step sequencer - Create music with this sequencer by Joe Harry.
WebGL Soundcloud Visualizer using Three.js - ThreeJS/WebGL Soundcloud player/visualizer based on HTML5 AudioContext API by Luigi Mannoni.
Oscilator - Testing the oscillator node from HTML5 audio API by Anej Gorkič.
Cubes Audio Visualizer - 10th contribution for codevember 2015 by Patrick Heng.
P5 Audio Tests 33 - Audio visualization using p5.js 3D elements and Soundcloud API
P5 Audio Tests 27 - Audio visualization using p5.js 3D elements and Soundcloud API
CircleLineNERDDISCO - Audio visualization with amazing analyser by Tim Pietrusky.
Clubberize yin yang example - An example using the clubberize helper to easily integrate clubber.js in javascript apps.

Libraries Audio

web-audio-analyser - A thin wrapper around the Web Audio API that takes an
web-audio-player - A cross-browser Web Audio player.
web-media-playback - Retrieve playback and buffering information about audio or video playing in the browser.
Pizzicato.js - Simplify the way you create and manipulate sounds via the Web Audio API.
ThreeAudio.js - Helps you create music visualizations in Three.js or tQuery.
Beeplay.js - Write a song In JavaScript.
MIDI.js - Making life easy to create a MIDI-app on the web.
Beep.js - A JavaScript toolkit for building browser-based synthesizers.
p5.sound - Brings the Processing approach to Web Audio and p5.js.
Audiolet - A JavaScript library for real-time audio synthesis and composition.
coffee-collider - A language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition in HTML5.
audio-render - A pass-through audio stream, providing structure for rendering stream audio data.
Octavian - Utilities for reasoning about musical notes, frequencies, and intervals
waveform-data - Audio Waveform Data Manipulation API – resample, offset and segment waveform data in JavaScript.
audiowaveform - C++ program to generate waveform data and render waveform images from audio files.
Aubio - C library for realtime audio labeling with bindings for Python and PD, support for ofx and Vamp.
audio - Generic Go package designed to define a common interface to analyze and/or process audio data
wav - Battle tested Wav decoder/encoder
standardized-audio-context - A cross-browser implementation of the AudioContext which aims to closely follow the standard.
web-audio-beat-detector - A beat detection utility which is using the Web Audio API.
meyda - Audio feature extraction for JavaScript.

Libraries Visualization

p5.js - A JavaScript library for creating graphic and interactive experiences, based on the core principles of Processing.
Pixi.js - A fast lightweight 2D library that works across all devices. The Pixi renderer allows everyone to enjoy the power of hardware acceleration without prior knowledge of WebGL.
sketch.js - Let’s you get straight to the fun parts of creative coding, without ever having to worry about shims or boilerplate code.
three.js - Three.js is a library that makes WebGL easy to use.
Two.js - A two-dimensional drawing API geared towards modern web browsers. It is renderer agnostic enabling the same API to draw in multiple contexts: SVG, Canvas, and WebGL.
BabylonJS - A complete JavaScript framework for building 3D games with HTML5, WebGL and Web Audio.
Web Audio Extension - A Chrome extension to play with Web Audio.
Cinder - A community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.
Processing - An open source programming language and integrated development environment built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities.
HYPE_processing - Collection of Processing classes that performs heavy lifting tasks while using a minimal amount of code writing.
The Force - Live coded shader editing with audio input.
Hylogen - Purely functional language embedded in Haskell for expressive live coding of fragment shaders (with audio input).
Peaks.js - Modular client-side JavaScript component designed for the display of and interaction with audio waveform material in the browser.
Clubber.js - Application of music theory in audio reactive visualizations.
Vuo — A realtime visual programming language for interactive media.
wavesurfer.js - A customizable audio waveform visualization, built on top of Web Audio API and HTML5 Canvas
wavebell - A javascript voice recorder with realtime waveform, using web microphone
Circular Audio Wave - A JS library for audio visualization in circular wave using Web Audio API and ECharts
Slang - An audio programming language built in JS
audioMotion-analyzer - High-resolution real-time audio spectrum analyzer JS module with no dependencies.
Cava - A cross-platform terminal visualizer.
Muser - Using machine learning to enhance music visualization in the browser.

People to Follow

Aaron Koblin - Artist, designer, programmer, and entrepreneur specializing in data and digital technologies.
Joshua Davis - An American designer, technologist, author and artist in new media.
Robert Hodgin - A creative coder living in Brooklyn. Co-creator of the Cinder C++.
Seb Lee-Delisle - An award-winning digital artist and speaker.
Raven Kwok - A visual artist, animator and creative programmer.
Chris Wilson - Open Web Guy, formerly of Microsoft and now working as a Developer Advocate at Google.
Jason Sigal - Creative Coder in residence at NYU’s and creator of web audio library for p5.js.
Shawn Lawson - An experiential media artist creating the computational sublime.
Matt DesLauriers - Creative coder at Jam 3.
Patrick Heng - Creative front-end developer. Studied at Hetic and Gobelins and works at Grouek.
Mat Preziotte - Absurd music visualizations and generative art.
Yannis Gravezas - A creative coder with several projects featured in chrome experiments, fwa and elsewhere.