Vibralizer

See your music.

I have always thought it was wild that music visualization — the kind we grew up with in WinAmp and Windows Media Player — was kind of just… forgotten in the shift to streaming platforms. That feeling only deepened throughout my PhD, where I spent years analyzing and visualizing birdsong audio, permanently adding a “sound as data” filter to my brain. I could see patterns in spectrograms that the ear alone couldn’t detect, and I wanted to bring that experience to the way we all listen to music.

So, while finishing up my postdoc at Vanderbilt, I started working on a side project with my partner, Nick. It’s called Vibralizer, and it’s a music visualizer for the streaming age — a real-time visualization app that transforms any audio source into dynamic, reactive visuals. Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Ableton, a live mic — whatever you play, Vibralizer responds to it.

Every visual in Vibralizer is hand-crafted. No AI-generated imagery. By humans, for humanity.

Why “Vibralizer”?

Simply: we visualize sonic vibrations. Vibration + visualizer = Vibralizer. But there’s a deeper connection.

In 1953, Donald Borror and Carl Reese published a landmark paper that translated birdsong into spectrograms — two-dimensional graphs of frequency over time that revealed intricacies in bird songs that humans cannot detect by ear alone. Before this, researchers could only convey song patterns based on their own hearing, in very rough detail. The technology that made it possible was a fully analog device called the Vibralyzer, and the spectrograms it produced were originally called “vibragrams.” That paper helped launch modern quantitative analysis of birdsong — the same field I would spend my doctoral career in, decades later.

The name Vibralizer is an homage to that history — to the avian origins of my expertise in audio analysis, and to the idea that seeing sound can transform how we understand it. You can read the full story on the Vibralizer blog.

A personal note

When I was diagnosed with hearing loss in my late twenties, my appreciation for visualizing sound became deeply personal. I could no longer hear every nuance in the music I loved, but I realized that the right visualization could restore that experience — making the full richness of sound accessible through sight. Vibralizer was born from that realization.

Features

Universal audio support — Works with any audio source on your system: streaming services, DAWs, microphones, and anything else.

Real-time reactive visuals — Dynamic visualizations that respond instantly to the music.

Hand-crafted design — Every visual element is human-made. No AI-generated imagery.

Versatile use — From living rooms to studios, listening sessions to live streams.

Get Vibralizer

Steam · itch.io · vibralizer.com

The Team

Vibralizer is built by me and Nick Pettit — one scientist and one developer, combining audio analysis expertise with software craftsmanship.