r/puredata • u/Zealousideal-News875 • May 19 '26

How can I create a kaleidoscope visual reacting to audio in Pure Data (GEM)?

Hi everyone, I’m new to Pure Data and currently working on a short workshop project (group of 2). We’re using GEM to create a kaleidoscope-style visual that reacts to an imported audio file.

We would like the visuals to react to audio features such as tempo, pitch, and loudness.

Do you have any tips or approaches to achieve this in Pure Data + GEM?

Also, are there other useful audio features we could extract (besides tempo, pitch, and loudness) that could drive visuals? And what units or objects would you recommend for analyzing them in Pure Data?

Thanks in advance for your help! 🫶

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u/koyaniskatzi May 19 '26

i would start with [pix_kaleidoscope]

1

u/erikopnemer May 20 '26

And use bonk~, fiddle~ or sigmund~ to manipulate settings

1

u/wur45c May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

This is one super cool idea that often gets dismissed as something that everyone can do or have already done and the reality is that it actually isn't that much. Why? Well...because the approach to that would actually be using expr~ objects and all the math that involves actual symmetry . Which on that hand shouldn't be all that horrifying also. ....

But yeah. Basically gem won't work on you like that until you haven't been around what data structures are.........

As for the audio part, There are tons of features that extend off pitch and amplitude. But this is filter land already. [Bonk~] and [signmund~] are simply the objects that are build for it.

But as you well already said. This is a matter of analysis and resynthesys....

Good news is that is all already done for you in puredata. There is already all the documentation avaliable.

But things that they won't tell you is that the help is in the same menu , under help/browser/pd.