For years I made kaleidoscopic art by hand in GIMP with music playing. Eventually I wanted the music to do the moving. Abstrakt is the software that came out of that: a small family of apps that listen to sound and turn it into art.
Abstrakt Engine (Android)
Abstrakt Engine is on the Google Play Store. It’s an audio-reactive kaleidoscope visualizer: play music, and the patterns breathe, fold and pulse along with it. You can export what you make as an MP4 and share it. It’s free with ads, and a one-time purchase removes them.
Abstrakt Deck (desktop)
Abstrakt Deck is the larger desktop version, written in Rust on the GPU. It tracks envelopes, frequency bands and tempo, applies color theory to the palette, and adds video feedback, multi-panel grids and a 3D cell renderer. It records straight to 4K video. It’s open source under MIT, available as a snap and from my Ubuntu PPA, and a Windows version is on its way to the Microsoft Store.
Why I built it
The visuals in my music videos and the patterns in my gallery come from the same idea: symmetry, layering and color driven by rhythm. Abstrakt is that idea made playable, so anyone can do it with their own music.
Get Abstrakt Engine: abstraktengine.com
Source code: github.com/onojk
