How to develop a music visualizer using openFrameworks

Question

I'm going to using openFrameworks to develop a music visualizer--music drive graphics. I can use Opengl to do the graphics. But the problem is the audio processing part. I have no experience in this field. I once thought I could extract music features-such as pitch, beat, volume to control the graphics. But I now I don't know how to start. I learned fft in math, but I don't know what to do after I get the spectrum of a piece of music, how can I extract those music features after fft? Or how to do the music processing part?

Answer 1

I would begin by playing with ofxFFT and then learning intuitively. Do you have set music you will be using? What are the characteristics you are looking for? You should probably start by looking for specific frequencies - like high, low, mid. You will likely find that depending on the type of sound / music you are playing that you won't always get a connection between what you think it should detect and what it actually detects. The wave is a series of values which you can perform operations on. You could detect the rate at which it changes, how many times it dips above or a below a range, etc.