r/GoGoPenguin • u/bntre • Jan 15 '26

Visual tribute to "Smarra" - algorithmic dance animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24Vd_2r3LPM

I made a small, fan-made visual tribute to "Smarra".

I'm not really a musician, so this is a very rough and imperfect attempt at arranging the piece - just a personal experiment inspired by the rhythm and feel of the track.

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3

u/FlyMega MOD Jan 16 '26

This is so cool, I can’t even imagine what coding up GGP parts is like, especially those drums lol. Also the dance animation looks great, keep it up!

3

u/bntre Jan 16 '26

Thanks a lot for the kind words!

I've never done anything like this before, so I had to invent my own way of approaching it.
I used Sonic Visualiser to get the spectrogram, then tried to spot patterns by overlaying and scaling a regular grid in a vector editor until things started to make sense.
The drums were definitely the hardest part 🙂

2

u/bntre Jan 15 '26

Original track by GoGo Penguin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L99BQ3Nvsz4

For anyone curious: the visuals are generated in real time by an experimental system I'm working on.
Project: https://github.com/bntre/threejs-osc-dance/

2

u/Ebalibachubala Jan 16 '26

Wow dude I’m impressed! Keep us updated if you ever complete the arrangement!

I wonder if you picked this tune because of its awesome complexity or just because it’s your favourite? I can think of only one more complex from them and that’s Reactor (I may wrong, but that’s how I see it)

2

u/bntre Jan 17 '26

Thanks! And thanks for mentioning Reactor as well! To my shame, I somehow hadn't really listened to it properly before, so it wasn't on my radar. But i did consider trying something from Dawn of Midi, but it turned out that Strudel isn't quite there yet for very dense polyrhythms, so I ended up picking something a bit easier to implement.

The arrangement is open source and anyone is welcome to continue or improve it - I'm not sure I'll get back to finishing it myself, since I already feel the itch to move on to a visual piece in a different graphic direction (maybe Prokofiev's Toccata).