The 1984 movie Electric Dreams prominently made use of one, although as a pre-generated effect, rather than calculated in real-time.įor PC/ DOS one of the first modern music visualization programs was the open-source, multi-platform Cthugha in 1993. Music and audio players were available on early home computers, Sound to Light Generator (1985, Infinite Software) used the ZX Spectrum's cassette player for example. In the United Kingdom music visualization was first pioneered by Fred Judd. The idea was to create a visual exploration that could be implemented into a Hi-Fi stereo system. in 1976, and designed by the initiator of the home version of Pong, Robert Brown. The first electronic music visualizer was the Atari Video Music introduced by Atari Inc. The unit never gained enough popularity and was in production for only a year.

The Atari Video Music, available in 1976. Music visualization may be achieved in a 2D or a 3D coordinate system where up to 6 dimensions can be modified, the 4th, 5th and 6th dimensions being color, intensity and transparency. Another possible distinction is seen by some in the ability of some music visualization systems (such as Geiss' MilkDrop) to create different visualizations for each song or audio every time the program is run, in contrast to other forms of music visualization (such as music videos or a laser lighting display) which always show the same visualization. 'Music visualization' can be defined, in contrast to previous existing pre-generated music plus visualization combinations (as for example music videos), by its characteristic as being real-time generated. 6 List of media players supporting visualization.

Media player visualizations for winamp