How to start writing a music visualizer in C++?

c++ opengl audio visualization
victor picture victor · May 4, 2009 · Viewed 32k times · Source

I'm interested in learning to use OpenGL and I had the idea of writing a music visualizer. Can anyone give me some pointers of what elements I'll need and how I should go about learning to do this?

Answer

RandomNickName42 picture RandomNickName42 · May 22, 2009

If you use C++/CLI, here's an example that uses WPF four (fourier that is;) display.

He references this site (archived) that has considerable information about what your asking, here's anoutline from the specific page;

How do we split sound into frequencies? Our ears do it by mechanical means, mathematicians do it using Fourier transforms, and computers do it using FFT.

  1. The Physics of Sound
    • Harmonic Oscillator
  2. Sampling Sounds
  3. Fourier Analysis
  4. Complex Numbers
  5. Digital Fourier Transform
  6. FFT

Ahhh, I found this (archived) a few minutes later, it's a native C++ analyzer. Code included, that should get you off and running.

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