What's this called and how does it work?

[Dominatus]

So I like to use my iPhone to listen to music occasionally. Shocker, right? Anyways, I remember watching music videos in the past where the rhythm, beat and bass are visually represented by something. That made me wonder if something like that exists for iPhone as an app, something which can interact with the speakers and turn pandora into a beautiful if trippy audio-visual... Thingy. And so we have the problem. I can't seem to figure out what this is, or what it's called. I barely understand that it's supposed to work through the microphone and convert that sound into code that triggers visual patterns matching the music being played. Any help on this? I just started a Foster The People station on pandora and think the visuals would be... Interesting.

[tg626]

An old stand alone device was called a color organ. The trippy stuff a media player shows you is called a visualization.

Vintage Color Organ - Music Visualizer App:

Edited September 26, 2014 by tg626

[Seret]

They're usually just called visualisations. Most audio playing software on the desktop includes a few. Have a pike around the IOS software library, I'm sure you'll be able to find some.

[Nibb31]

My favorite visualization was MilkDrop 2.0 for Winamp. I think it's still around on iOS and Android under the name Project M.