projectM

Throughout humanity’s history, art has taken many forms, from painting, sculpting and writing to singing and playing a vast array of musical instruments. Thanks to the constant advances in science and computer technology, most artistic endeavors have been digitized, with some taking art to unprecedented levels of expression.

One magnificent display of the unparalleled potential of human imagination is the transformation of audio waves into animations through the art of music visualization, which is excellently conveyed through projectM, an impressive library of community-made screensavers that react to currently playing music tracks.

When starting up the program, users are instantly greeted to a wide variety of psychedelic two-dimensional and three-dimensional animated screensavers that react to the currently playing sounds via Windows’ main audio device.

This application’s particular advantage is that unlike Winamp’s Milkdrop implementation, users can play any music or sounds from multiple sources, giving you unlimited freedom compatibility-wise. While the visualizer boots up in a resizable window, one can press the Control and F keys simultaneously for enabling the full screen mode for extending the canvas on which the animations are displayed.

Moreover, while the program will cycle through visuals by itself, you can use the left and right key to navigate manually if you want to get to a certain pattern of animations faster. Pressing the downward key toggles the experimental visualizations, for those who want an even larger amount of screensavers to choose from.

If a certain row of animations tends to be repeated too frequently, users can press the Enter key for bringing up a random visualization. Those who have already encountered their favorite preset can press the space key to lock it in place and prevent it from changing.

Whether you miss Winamp’s or Windows Media Player’s music visualization patterns that plenty of people grew up with, or you want some inspiration for your artistic endeavors, projectM is a wonderful utility that transcribes sound into visually rendered hypnotic animations to accompany you while listening to your favorite songs.