A color music visualizer: light that breathes with the song.

Chroma is LIQUIDWAVE's style of color. Where much of LIQUIDWAVE draws on black, Chroma fills the frame: a scrolling waterfall of the spectrum, stage light through a theater scrim, the northern lights, blocks of deep color and concentric rings of the rainbow. The music sets how the light breathes, swells and drifts.

How Chroma follows the music

Chroma reads the same seven bands as the rest of LIQUIDWAVE, from sub-bass to air, and spends them on light:

• The low end swells. Bass widens Curtain's wash bands, grows Color Field's middle block and opens Iris's bloom.
• Each band has a place. Spectrogram stacks the bands from bottom to top, and Curtain's narrow streaks each follow a band of their own.
• Motion never runs backward. Curtain's bands drift one way, Color Field's hue walks on, and Iris's color wheel turns a notch on every hit, all on counters that only go forward, so nothing stutters when the tempo estimate shifts.

Every Chroma scene

Spectrogram. A scrolling waterfall of time and frequency, in the tradition of the sonograph. The newest sound enters at the right edge and scrolls left, low bands at the bottom and high bands at the top, the hue running from cyan in the bass to magenta at the top and the brightness following each band's level. The drums light the live edge: the kick the bottom rows, the snare the middle, the hi-hats the top.

Curtain. Vertical bands of teal and green light behind heavy, 35 mm-style film grain, like stage lights seen through a theater scrim: a few wide, deeply blurred wash bands at the back, many narrow, sharper streaks in front. Every band drifts in one direction and never reverses. Dense, fast tracks add a tailwind, every drum hit lurches the bands forward, the snare widens and whitens the streaks, and the hi-hats flare the filaments and the grain.

Aurora. Northern-lights curtains drifting over a starlit night sky, three layers at different depths, green at the foot and violet at the top. The bass brightens and thickens the curtains, the busyness of the music sets how fast they drift, and the highest frequencies shimmer along their top edges. Each kick brightens the curtains, and each snare flares a bright fold of its own.

Color Field. Three horizontal blocks of deep color that walk the rainbow continuously, sometimes neighbors on the color wheel, sometimes contrasting. The hue advances with loudness and tempo, so the colors travel faster on faster, louder music. A bass-heavy passage swells the middle block and treble squeezes it back, and each drum lifts its own block a little. A hit is a breath, not a flash.

Iris. Concentric rings of color centered on the screen, the hues rotating through the rainbow, a pale bloom at the center and the rings fading to black toward the corners. The bass sets the size of the bloom and the kick swells it, the snare tightens the rings into hard wedges for the hit, and every hit turns the color wheel a notch, never back.

How Chroma plays with different music

Dense, fast dance music keeps Curtain moving and Color Field's colors traveling, and every hit nudges Iris round the wheel. Bass-heavy music swells the wide shapes: Curtain's washes, Color Field's middle block, Iris's bloom. A bright mix with busy hi-hats lights the top of Spectrogram and the upper edges of Aurora. Quiet music leaves the light dimmer and the motion slow, and in silence Aurora fades to a dark sky.

What to expect

Spectrogram shows bands, not notes. It draws the seven bands LIQUIDWAVE measures, so it reads the balance of a mix, not individual pitches. For the music note by note, the Spectral scenes, new in 1.1, read a much finer spectrum.

Not every scene changes color with the music. Curtain stays teal and green, and Aurora keeps its green-to-violet sky, its tops leaning toward magenta in a bright mix; the music mostly changes their brightness, width and motion. Color Field and Iris are the ones whose hues travel.

It lights the room. Color Field fills the whole frame with color, so on a big screen in a dark room it is a lot of light. For music drawn on a black ground, try Raster or Line.

Where to go next

Lighting turns the same kind of light into beams through smoke. Metal bends color across moving chrome. Every style is on the styles page. LIQUIDWAVE for Mac is a free download with two scenes, Wave and one you pick, and one purchase inside the app unlocks the rest of the 60+ scenes, every Chroma scene included.