Blog · Launch · May 26, 2026
Welcome to Spiralyst Lab.
A macOS app that turns any sound on your Mac into live fractal art — built for DJ sets, branded event displays, and generative artists. We're live.
Spiralyst Lab is a native macOS app that captures live audio — system sound, a mic, or any audio input device — and renders 2D and 3D fractal art that moves with the music in real time. It's been a long project to build, and as of today, it's out: signed, notarized, and available at spiralyst.com for $24.99 per year.
It started from a simple idea: that the math behind fractals and the math behind music belong on the same screen. Both are built from simple rules repeating at every scale; both reward you for looking — or listening — closer. The goal was a tool that doesn't just play a loop next to your music, but actually listens to it and draws from it, frame by frame.
This is the part we're proud of: there's nothing pre-rendered. Every frame is generated live from the audio in the room, and no two frames are the same.
What's in v3.0
The release version covers what we set out to build:
- An audio-reactive engine at the core. Spiralyst Lab runs an FFT on the incoming sound and extracts musical features in real time — amplitude across frequency bands, spectral centroid (brightness), spectral flux (onset / attack energy), and detected pitch. You define your own frequency bands and route each one to a visual parameter. Let the kick drum pulse the zoom; the hats shimmer the color; the lead melody bend the geometry.
- Direct system-audio capture. No virtual audio cables, no loopback drivers — Spiralyst Lab captures macOS system audio natively. Point it at whatever's playing (your DJ software, a music app, a browser tab) and go. Prefer a live source? Switch to any mic or audio interface macOS recognizes.
- 27 fractal forms across 2D and 3D. In 2D: Archimedean and logarithmic spirals, phyllotaxis, fractal roses, the Pythagoras tree, the Apollonian gasket, Julia sets — plus an SVG-fractal mode that grows procedural detail from any vector shape you import. In 3D: ray-marched Mandelbulb and Mandelbox, Menger sponge, quaternion Julia sets, KIFS symmetry solids, gyroid surfaces, and a few others.
- Built for the stage. One control takes the canvas fullscreen for a projector, TV, or LED wall. The audio-to-visual path is tuned for live use, with an end-to-end latency measured around 50 ms — tight enough that the reaction feels locked to the beat.
- Export to video, image, and vector. Capture loops as MP4, MOV, or WebM at up to 4K. Grab PNG stills at custom DPI for print. For 2D fractals, export crisp scalable SVG.
- A local automation API. Every on-screen control has a programmatic twin — a complete local HTTP API, plus a set of reference Claude Code skills for anyone who wants a ready-to-install agent integration. We designed Spiralyst Lab from the start to be driven by code, including by AI agents.
What it actually hears
The engine doesn't just track loudness. Within each frequency band you draw, you choose what signal drives the visual — amplitude, spectral centroid (brightness), spectral flux (onset / attack energy), or pitch. Here's the Piano band preset loaded into an audio-reactive band filter, with a C-scale playing into Spiralyst Lab and pitch detection driving a fractal phyllotaxis:
The audio-reactive band filter shows it live — Piano preset selected (range 33 Hz – 587 Hz, roughly A1 – D5), Signal set to Pitch, current detection 268 Hz (C4). As the C-scale moves up and down the piano range, the band-position slider follows each note, and the visual follows the slider. Bass-to-zoom is the easy demo; pitch-to-anything is the one we keep showing to skeptics.
More of the 27 fractal forms in motion are in the gallery — each tile has a sub-page with the parameters that built it.
Who it's for
Three audiences we built this for:
- DJs branching into visuals. You're playing a 200-cap room, the sound is dialed, and the screen behind you is a static logo. Hiring a VJ isn't in the budget for every gig. Spiralyst Lab captures your DJ software's audio directly, maps the kick to the zoom and the highs to the color, and sends the canvas fullscreen to the projector. Every drop lands on the wall, no two nights look the same.
- Branded event displays. A product launch or trade-show booth needs a screen that pulls people in — but on brand, not generic stock motion. Import the client's logo as an SVG and Spiralyst Lab grows the fractal from that mark, in their brand colors, reacting to the keynote audio or the booth playlist. The output is a living brand display you can run all day and capture as a 4K loop for the post-event reel.
- Galleries and ambient installations. A piece that breathes for hours without obviously looping — Spiralyst Lab renders fractals live, so the work is always new. Set it to a mic for room sound, pick a contemplative palette, let it run.
Private by design
Spiralyst Lab has no account, no telemetry, no analytics. Audio is analyzed in the moment to drive the visuals and is never written to disk or sent over the network. The only time data changes hands is checkout, handled by PayPal. Your work, your sound, and your habits stay yours. That's not a footnote — it's a design choice we made early and plan to keep making.
About the license
$24.99 for a 1-year license. The annual term is deliberate. It keeps the entire user base on a current, code-signed, notarized build that's secure and supported — instead of decade-old copies running unpatched code in the wild. When the year is up, renew at the same honest price.
Direct download, signed and notarized by Apple. Not on the Mac App Store — by design;
direct distribution lets us ship a real .dmg and run a real local API
surface without sandbox constraints.
What's next
We're shipping post-launch tutorials — the long-form videos for System audio, Frequency bands, Auto-Reactivity, Export, Fractal types, Going fullscreen for a gig, and Branded displays. Watch the tutorials page for those. The automation surface has its own write-up for the technical audience.
Beyond that, we've got a list — multi-display "detached" VJ output is in flight, more fractal families are queued, and we're working on Auto-Reactivity v2. We'll write plainly in release notes about anything that changes how Spiralyst Lab is owned or operated, before it affects you.
Thanks for being here.