User Guide

An audiovisual performance tool

bzzzbz lets you experiment and play with audio-reactive visuals, giving you the ability of controlling them live, creating your own mappings and patterns for immersive audiovisual performances. The user guide will give you a quick insight on how to run the in-repository shaders (the scripts generating the videos). If you want to know more about audiovisuals and the reasons behind bzzzbz check out the design specifications page.

Brief software overview

Now that the environment is set-up and dependencies are installed (detailed in the Getting started page) let us overview the software structure.

Audio + Control + OpenGL pulling in shaders.

Run the in-repository shaders

There are a number of shader programs (graphics) provided with v1.0, useful to demonstrate the various features of bzzzbz. To run these, first run cmake . in the main folder which will create all the required Makefiles.

Main program

The executable bz is created in by running make in the main folder. Running this demonstrates the real-time responsiveness of bzzzbz to audio and hands-on control using the shader cells.glsl to generate graphics.

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Example shaders

..to outline bzzzbz. There are a number of examples included that clearly demonstrate the available features and help in understanding our product. To run these, first run make in the ./src/examples/ directory which will create the executables. The name of the executable corresponds to that of the implementation file.

Demonstrating: Graphics

Desktop compatible

This program is designed to show the OpenGL renderer in action and produce an output based on the shader creation.glsl. This can also be used to test new shaders as it relies only on OpenGL. To import your own shaders the implementation file ex_opengl.cpp must be modified .

Demonstrating: Audio Response

Desktop compatible

With this program you can try out how the graphics respond to audio by running ex_audio. The example displays a simple spectrum to visualize the incoming audio using the shader spectrum.glsl There is another shader available spectrum_slow.glsl which led to performance issues (especially on the Pi). Compare the two shaders to gain better insight into efficient GPU programming with GLSL.

Demonstrating: Control Surface

Version 1.0 of bzzzbz

Create your own shader

Intro to GLSL and ref to technical guides. Experiment with GLSLs