It listens
With local files, Uzume hears the whole playlist before it plays a note. With anything else — Apple Music, Spotify, a browser tab — it listens to what is actually coming out of your Mac.
Uzume
A music visualizer for macOS that listens, analyzes, and accompanies.
The public beta is free and open source, MIT-licensed, for Apple silicon Macs on macOS 15 or later. Signed and notarized, and on GitHub if you would rather build it yourself.
Uzume 0.9.0 · disk image, 172 MB · release notes
What it does
Uzume — oo-ZOO-meh — is named for a dancer who drew the light out of a cave. What the app does is less mythic: it listens to your music, works out what is in it, and draws something to go with it.
It analyzes
It pulls the music apart — drums, bass, voice, everything else — and follows each one separately, along with where the beats fall and how the harmony moves. On a local file that starts immediately; from a streaming app it takes ten or fifteen seconds, and works from the mix until then.
It accompanies
Scenes are written to answer particular parts of it — bass drives one thing, the vocal line another — so what you see follows the music instead of twitching at its volume.
Featured scenes
A scene is one way of drawing the music — its own shapes, its own colors, its own way of answering a beat. Each one is written by somebody, and their name stays on it. These are some of them, recorded from Uzume and published unedited.
Anyone can write one. The ones that make it in become part of what every listener sees. The code, and the guide to writing a scene, are on GitHub.
The name
In the Kojiki, the sun shuts herself in a cave and the world goes dark. A plan is made, a mirror is hung to catch light that does not yet exist, and Ame-no-Uzume stamps out a rhythm and dances until the gods roar. The sun opens the door to see what could possibly be worth that much noise.
The dancing is what brings the light out. That is the whole idea.