Sleep well, stranger.
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Here’s Maladaptive, a late night vignette.
I wanted the bass of this track to feel like a warm blanket during a long winter night. A hug for the ears. And also like the rumbling inside a spaceship traveling through a wormhole… for days with no comms, calmly falling down the hyperspace.
While I played the music by hand, the video is all code. The fungus in the Petri dish is a simulation of 25 million organisms emitting and sensing chemicals and leaving trails — based on the physarum approach popularized by Sage Jenson. I implemented it as a compute shader running on the GPU in realtime-interactive-4k-60fps in a custom Metal + Swift environment. Then I put it in Blender where I path-traced it in definitely-not-realtime: the 2:40 4k30 video took five weeks to render on my maxed-out M1 Max Mac Studio. The ring light in the scene is controlled by audio data, displaying a texture with visualization that I wrote in Python. Camera movement is procedural as well — coded with Blender geometry nodes. I put final touches in DaVinci Resolve to make everything look more real/analog. It was my first time using Resolve and it was daunting in the beginning but well worth the effort in the end.
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