Sphera
Making a mix spatial, immediate, and legible in real time.
Artifacts
- Demo
- Walkthrough
- Technical article
- Performance analysis
- GitHub
Why
Most analysis tools split a mix into separate meters and plots. Sphera asks whether frequency, stereo balance, and phase can remain part of one coherent spatial model.
Approach
Frequency energy maps to surface texture, stereo balance shifts the geometry, and phase masking appears as zones of brightness. Analysis modes change without replacing the central sphere, preserving the producer's mental model.
Results
The working browser demo combines real-time Web Audio analysis with Three.js and GLSL rendering. The project received support from the Wharton Venture Lab Innovation Fund.
Things I got wrong
Visual richness is not the same as analytical clarity. The hardest iterations were subtractive: reducing motion and surface detail until a change in the signal produced an interpretable change on screen.
Future work
The next artifact will pair a performance analysis with a technical account of the mappings between signal features and geometry.