Resonance

March 2026

Alien organism in a concrete room, green-glowing core with tentacles spreading across the walls

The organism during a high-energy passage, intense green emission flooding the room

Wide shot with all audio-reactive elements active, light rings travelling along the tentacles

Role: Concept, 3D & Animation, Lighting
Tools: Blender (Cycles), BAT add-on, Premiere Pro
Time Spent: ~2 weeks
Team: Solo (B.A. thesis)

Resonance is part of my thesis and was designed to showcase Better Audio Tools (BAT), the Blender add-on I developed alongside it, across a variety of songs. The whole scene is procedural: no keyframes, and nothing tied to a specific song. You feed in a track, run the analysis, and the environment adapts to it.

Two versions of Resonance were created with different songs, to verify the claims made in my thesis and to highlight the add-on's adaptability.

The Scene

The setting is a bare, near-white concrete room, lit only by a faint fill from the background and from a hallway off to the right. At its centre sits an alien organism: a glowing core clinging to the walls and ceiling with dark, wet-looking tentacles, loosely inspired by the wet skin of the Xenomorphs in Alien.

The palette is deliberately narrow. The organism is the only source of coloured light, a green-turquoise glow with red and blue accents from the side structures, so when the audio pushes the emission up, the whole room changes colour with it.

Audio Mapping

Each audio stem drives a different part of the creature. The tentacles follow the bassline, moving through animated noise displacement; the central core swells and glows with the vocal track; the roots use a generic offset BPM trigger function; and the red and blue side elements light up with the drum and bass stems. Nothing is hand-animated; the song itself choreographs the scene.

High-energy state with light rings travelling along the tentacles and all three colour sources active — High-energy song segment triggering all emissive components

Technical Setup

The organism is one large Geometry Nodes tree with sub-systems for the tentacles, roots, core and veins. The side structures reuse adapted parts of it. BAT can drive both shader and light emission directly, as Cycles also lets shader nodes control lights.

Blender interface: the organism highlighted orange inside the white room, with its Geometry Nodes tree and spreadsheet — Solid view of the organism and its Geometry Nodes tree in Blender

Swapping in a new song takes ten to twenty minutes of hands-on work: import the track, run the automatic stem separation, let BAT assign the new data to the node network and regenerate the cached data. Lighting and animation need no manual adjustment. The one caveat: it's pre-rendered rather than real-time, so it works as a visual system, not a live performance tool.

Wireframe view of the organism and room in Blender, with the Better Audio Tools panel listing the vocals, drums, bass and other stems — Wireframe view of the room