Coming to the Mac App Store

Sparks of Light

A standalone macOS visualizer that turns live MIDI, audio, and MIDI/audio files into real-time particle and note graphics — built for live performance and streaming capture.

The Problem

Performers and streamers want music-reactive visuals without wiring up a browser, a game engine, or a tangle of plugins. Sparks of Light is a single native app: plug in a controller or feed it audio, choose a style, and capture the window. No web stack, no separate browser, no sidecar processes — just a self-contained app that follows the music.

Key Features

Five visual stylesFlying Particles, Falling Notes, Piano Roll Bars, Burst, and Gem Particles (hexagonal gems with bloom, smoke, streaklets, rays, and wind turbulence)
Four note sources, one pipelineLive MIDI (CoreMIDI, hot-pluggable), audio-to-MIDI via an embedded BasicPitch model, MIDI file playback, and audio file playback, all funneling through a single lock-free engine
On-screen 88-key pianoClick to play and drag for glissando, useful for auditioning during capture rehearsals
Source overrideForce Both, MIDI-only, or Audio-only on the fly, so live playing and audio transcription never fight each other during capture
Audio-to-MIDI cleanupNoise gate (threshold + confidence), monophonic mode, and key-range and melody-range filters for clean transcription
Three colour modesPitch-class hue, fixed colour, or a configurable velocity gradient
Deep per-style tuningSpeed, gravity, scatter, lifetime, trail, brightness, blend mode, and post-process bloom, plus per-gem wind, turbulence, smoke, and rays
Transport with loop & auto-reloadPlay, pause, stop, loop, and scrub loaded files; MIDI files auto-reload when you re-export them from a DAW
Unified live settings panel (⌘,)Every control in one place, live-tuned and persisted; device management snaps back and tells you why when the hardware refuses a change
OSC controlEvery visual control is drivable over OSC, and the app can snapshot its own state for recall
Built for OBSVsync'd OpenGL rendering, chroma-green background for keying, full-screen toggle, and toggleable settings, transport, and debug panels
Self-containedNative Apple Silicon, no web calls, no cloud, no login — the whole experience runs locally

Screenshots

Thirty presets ship in the factory bank, covering all five visual styles. These six were captured over OSC: the app recalled each preset and snapshotted its own window mid-performance.

Gem Cascade preset: dense hexagonal gems in yellow, green, magenta and blue falling toward the keyboard, each trailing a coloured streak — Gem Cascade

Roll And Rise preset: horizontal piano-roll bars in saturated colour rising from the keys, with fine rays fanning up behind them — Roll and Rise

High Contrast preset: soft pastel bokeh spheres in pink, violet and blue filling the canvas — High Contrast

Paper Lantern preset: deep violet shapes ringed in turquoise, floating on a warm amber ground — Paper Lantern

Deep Spectrum preset: violet blooms with amber cores scattered across a black field — Deep Spectrum

Smoke Only preset: monochrome white smoke trails drifting upward from the keyboard against black — Smoke Only