i remembered i’d already built this once. a webcam destroyer, a trippy effect for performing, sitting in another project’s folder. i dug it out and put it on the site.
first real test: i switched it to the microphone, the room was silent, and the picture was still shaking. that’s a contradiction. zero sound means zero movement. that rule ate the whole evening.
what i came up with is a baseline. press a button, it listens for a few seconds and remembers how loud the room gets. everything after that is measured against it. at 90 to 100 it goes off. at 0 to 10 almost nothing moves.
and loud is the wrong thing to follow anyway. the picture should answer the kick: lows plus a jump in volume. people screaming in a breakdown are loud too, and that shouldn’t flash. so there’s an impulse meter you can watch, a shake for the flow, a zoom punch for the hit, and a smart flash that fires on the drop and then has to sit through 10 to 15 quiet seconds before it’s allowed again.
RAVE mode drives all of it by itself. the default look is black, white and red, with a chessboard split now and then, because the chessboard is mine. i also had to stop the screen from holding full white. in a club that just blinds people.
two things broke later. it ran at about 10 fps on my laptop and on an iphone 14 pro, a phone that plays gta san andreas without a stutter. the culprit was reading frames back and taking the picture apart on the main thread. that lives in a worker now. and one morning the iphone reloaded the page on download and i lost an hour of footage. takes are written to disk while they record now, so they survive a crash.