AJ Tapes tvOS · Visualizer Preview

Murmuration

Starlings at last light. A granular flock — part smoke, part sparks — wheels over a dusk sky, and the music steers it: bass hits snap it tight, mids stretch it into ribbons, highs flick glints off its edges. Rendered offline straight from murmurationFragment; on the Apple TV it tracks the live FFT.

Twelve seconds, scripted 122 bpm pulse. The flock contracts and ignites on each downbeat — the murmuration “whoomp” — then relaxes and drifts between hits. Individual birds flutter at ~1–2 Hz inside the mass.

How it listens

Bass punch: Flock snaps tight (long axis −26%, width −42%) and the grain ignites. New uniform in padding.x: onset detected from the raw pre-smoothing bass, instant attack, ~280 ms exponential release — beat-locked, not loudness-following.
Mids: Lean the heading into turns and stretch the envelope into ribbons.
Highs: Wing glints flicked from a handful of birds; shimmer across the grain.
Smoothed bass: Sets the glow floor of flecks and birds, so quiet passages dim the whole flock.

Four states

Quiet passage: a thin golden column of birds climbing the right of frame — **Quiet.** Low energy, the flock loosens into a slow climbing column.

Groove: a diagonal flock band, loose and granular — **Groove.** Mid energy — elongated, banking, grain streaming through the body.

Same instant with bass punch: flock contracted, brighter, denser — **The hit.** Same instant as “Groove” with punch at 0.95 — tighter, hotter, denser.

Split: a rose-tinted ribbon of birds sweeping the lower left — **Split.** A ~5-minute cycle pulls the flock into two lobes and rejoins them.

Burn-in posture

Nothing can rest: the flock wanders on incommensurate Lissajous paths, the whole scene drifts, and the interior grain streams continuously through the flock frame.
Dark by construction — dusk gradient and afterglow stay dim, stars are sparse and faint, peak brightness is capped at 0.85 under a vignette.
Palette evolves on the standard time × 0.02 phase (amber ↔ rose-gold), plus the shared sub-pixel vertex jitter, luminance breathing, and 30-minute dim failsafe.

Touched: PlasmaShader.metal (new murmurationFragment), PlasmaMetalView.swift (enum case + bass-punch envelope in padding.x), CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md ×4. The picker lists “Murmuration” automatically (last cell); default visualizer unchanged. tvOS build: succeeded.