The Problem
When I make music I often use stereo manipulation tricks, such as applying the Haas effect to increase the perception of sonic width.
One thing I've noticed about stereo manipulation is that if everything is wide, nothing is wide. As such, the change in width over time is important. But we don't have any tools which show illustrate changes in width over time.
The Process
This thought originally came to me in a dream. In my dream I was putting the finishing touches on a song. I glanced up at a screen to check a tool which displayed the distribution of frequencies across the stereo field. It was a graph which showed the change in width over time. As such, I woke up from my dream realized that I really wanted this tool, and I got down to business.
I gave my dad, a recently retired computer programmer, a call tell him about the idea. It was the beginning of lockdown during the pandemic so we decided to work on it together as a passion project. He drafted up the original algorithm using Visual Basic and graphed it in Excel — it was quite impressive. We started teaching ourselves the JUCE audio framework for C++. At a certain point though, we realized we were out of our depth and we tapped Adam from Node.Audio
We explored a few different routes, tweaking the algorithm as we went. Once we got it working in the 2d sense with JUCE, we brought in some OpenGL experts to allow for 3D graphing. I've been in a lot of digital music production communities over the years, so I reached out to people on Twitter and Discord and gathered up some beta testers.
During the development of this tool, MiniMeters blew up. It's so fun to be able to show off what you're working on with MiniMeters bumping in the frame when filming for social media. This game me the inspiration to make a bunch of colorful presets, and allow users to make their own as well.
The Product
The Stereo Field Analyzer is essentially what I saw in my dream (hence the name of the company). It splits sound into 6 frequency bands and assigns a color to each band. The user can change the colors of each frequency band which leads to lots of customization.
I intentionally kept the plugin simple because I wanted it do serve the purpose of showing perceived width over time. Also, it just looks cool. And all musicians know that feeling of excitement of starting a song and wanting to show it off with your friends. The Stereo Field Analyzer gives you an engaging graphic to look at when you want to flex your latest tune. With over 60 presets, there are lots of fun ways to view your sound.
