A liquid metal visualizer: chrome that moves with your music.

Metal is LIQUIDWAVE's style of reflective surfaces: molten chrome, white foil, steel drapery, holographic film and polished plate, each filling the frame and mirroring a studio of light. Liquid Metal, the scene that carries the app's name, leads it. The music shapes the metal. It never switches the lights.

The music moves the surface, not the light

A mirror turns every change of slope into a change of light, so a surface that pulses on the beat reads as a flickering screen. The Metal scenes keep the beat out of their brightness and color and spend the music on shape:

• The low end raises the relief. Bass, averaged over about a second, swells the folds on a heavy passage, more than twice as tall on most sheets, instead of pumping on every kick.
• The mids and highs add a shimmer of fine ripples, gone in silence.
• Loudness and the beat count move the flow, on counters that only go forward, so the metal never jumps back.
• Each kick and snare sends a dent and a swell through the surface where the hit lands, the folds sliding aside as it passes.
• The upper mids turn the color, slowly. New in 1.1: the hue of the scenes with color follows the high-mid and high bands over a second or two, while the brightness holds.

A click anywhere on the picture presses a dent of your own, deeper than a drum's.

Every Metal scene

Liquid Metal. A sheet of molten chrome seen from a low camera, churning like slow mercury. Its folds mirror an overcast sky on their upper slopes and a dark floor in their creases, and a thin film tints them, pink on the rises, violet on the flanks, blue on the steep edges. A bright mix walks the tints round, the pinks to blue and the blues to sky and green.

Foil. White foil seen close and flat-on, with tighter, more numerous folds. At rest, and in a dark or bass-heavy mix, it reads as aluminum with a pearl sheen. As the upper mids rise, it opens into a pale iridescence.

Silk. Chrome drapery in cold steel blue. Where the other sheets churn, Silk has a grain: its folds run in long ridges, bent into the S-curves of folded cloth, with a thin gold rim on a few edges. As the top of the mix opens up, the room's steel blue turns periwinkle, then lavender.

Prism. Liquid Metal's pour from a lower camera, with the horizon just over the top edge, under a film thick enough to run the whole spectrum: violet and blue far off, cyan across the middle, yellow and magenta where a fold faces you. A bright top end rolls the spectrum on toward gold, and a dark one draws it back toward violet.

Hologram. Holographic foil seen from straight above, silver chrome pulled into long diagonal streaks. Flat metal stays silver, and every flank runs the spectrum in thin ordered bands, red through violet, before the crease turns dark. The upper mids slide the bands along the spectrum.

Dent. New in 1.1: a thick steel plate under strip lights. Flat, it holds one even light. Every kick and snare presses a dent into the plate where the hit lands, and the dent springs back out as a swell, bending the strips' reflections into dark rings and bright arcs until the plate settles flat again.

Chrome. Also new in 1.1: a monochrome slab of liquid metal. A rounded mirror rim rolls off to black at the frame's edge, with a groove inside it and a gray mirror pool in the middle. Kicks and snares press Dent's dent into the pool, and a loud low end widens the faint waves along the outlines and slowly rolls the face.

Dent and Chrome are flat where the sheets are folded, so a drum presses deeper into them: on a plate, a sheet's small ripple wouldn't show.

How Metal plays with different music

Metal follows passages more than single beats. A bass-heavy track swells the relief over a bar or two, a bright mix turns the color, and a drum-led track ripples the sheets on every hit without making them flash. Quiet music keeps them churning gently in their own colors, and silence slows them to a crawl, the color thinning to a sheen.

What to expect

Metal doesn't flash on the beat. If you want the picture to blink with the kick, Cyber does that.

Dent waits for drums. Its plate dents only when a kick or snare lands. A solo piano or an ambient pad leaves it nearly flat, with a faint undulation from the bass. Chrome breathes on its own, but its dents also come only from hits.

The color lags the mix, on purpose. The tint follows a second or two of the upper mids, so a hi-hat pattern reads as a level rather than a flicker.

Where to go next

Fluid, also new in 1.1, keeps Metal's rule for liquids: the sound moves them, never the light. Chroma trades reflections for atmospheric fields of color. 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 Metal scene included.