Sonica - Maya Plug-in to Synchronize Animation to Sound

Sonica is a Maya™ plug-in useful for animators who want to synchronize their animation to sound. Sound has certain properties such as pitch, loudness, beat etc. Digital sound lends itself to mathematical analysis thus enabling these properties to be extracted. Sonica extracts the spectrum and waveform and makes it available to Maya animators via dependency nodes.

Sonica version 1.0

Spectrum

Visual representation of sound spectrum can be very hypnotizing. With fine enough banding, one can identify which band or bands a particular instrument corresponds to, e.g. drums correspond to the lower end of the spectrum, human voice corresponds to middle of the audible range.

Spectrum with arbitrary banding

The spectrum is broken up into frequency bands. A user can create arbitrary banding boundaries for discretizing the spectrum.

Functionality available as Maya nodes

Sonica nodes are implemented as Maya dependency graph nodes hence they can be easily combined with other nodes to create interesting graphs. Each node provides a specific well defined functionality and can be combined with other nodes in interesting ways. For example, instead of using sound as the source of input, one can use other nodes that output a value over time.

Multi-track Support

Digital sound files can have many tracks. Sonica will extract data from all the tracks and can process it. An animator may decided to ignore certain tracks by ignoring the output from Sonica.

Waveform

A waveform node is available for users who want to animate to the sound amplitude. Something like a vibrating speaker's diaphragm, or an oscillating record player's needle would be ideal candidates for animating to the waveform data.

Pre-packaged scripts

Most common visual representation of musical sound is the vertical bars. Sonica comes with a pre-wired set of nodes forming a network for creating such a visual animation.