This is a teaser trailer for Glenn Marshall‘s iPhone music visualization application, Zio.

Marshall is known to Synthtopia readers for his amazing generative music videos.

About Zio, Marshall says:

I would say I’m at the half way stage now, and after doubting almost daily the project and my ability to realise it, for the first time I feel confident that I can actually pull this off and come up with something half decent on the iPhone.

The direction I’m taking for my first app will be based on the ‘Music is Math’ animation style, semi-abstract, in black and white – roots and vines growing endlessly in real-time. It will be interactive, respond to touch,orientation etc, have randomising features and maybe a few other tricks.

The demo runs smoothly at 24 fps, it can run a lot faster, but I need headroom to implement the rest of the visuals to be added – to be included next will be the shading/shadow algoritms (more bitmaps), the sprites/particles flying around through a perlin noise field, and also I can hopefully have a duplicate layer of the growing vines in the background, as is common in all my videos to date using this system.

Marshall adds:

I want to create something enigmatic, sublime. Like my mum said when I showed it to her, it’s peaceful to watch, like an aquarium… which is a very good comparison.

Marshall’s work reminds me of fractals, in the way that they seem to offer infinite detail as you look closer, and of Brian Eno’s music, in the way he creates controlled processes to create something beautiful.

Let me know what you think of Glenn Marshall’s Zio. Can you see using something like this as a visualizer to accompany live electronic music?