Think you know music videos? Jono Brandel wants you to think again

To say that we’re a fan of digital and interactive designer Jono Brandel would be a bit of an understatement. We even interviewed him about his practice last year. So when he got in touch to tell us about his new project, in which he has collaborated with musician Kimbra to produce an app which visualises her new single – an app-turned-music video, if you will – we were understandably curious.

Creating a landscape of geometric shapes, flickering colours and flying forms, the app was created to accompany new single Carolina, and recreates the sense of a taking a roadtrip through the American countryside in a car. It’s delightfully satisfying, and stays true to Jono’s characteristic love of colour, shape and sound (remember Patatap, for example?)

“The music visualisation uses Three.js, a popular three-dimensional drawing api for the web,” Jono explains of the magic behind the moving imagery. “I place a camera in the world and make it move along a spline. I then create a number of different types of shapes for the various instruments in the track. As the song plays each shape has specific triggers. When one of these triggers occurs the shape is placed in the impending field of view of the camera. As the camera moves the shape flies by as if we were in a car or a train passing through a landscape.”

If you’re that way inclined, you can find more information and all of the code over on the project’s github page.