Glyphs — the screen in characters: big ASCII art

On screen

What Glyphs shows

Glyphs renders a 3D scene off screen, then converts it into a grid of characters: a scrolling polygon tunnel, a sphere warped by the bass, your album art full screen, a water surface seen from above, the track title in volume, turning. Wherever the image has a contour, the character follows its direction — bars, slashes, brackets, chevrons; elsewhere a ramp of sixteen characters from the dot to the solid block follows the density. That is what makes the image readable, what naive ASCII art lacks. The characters are crisp, drawn at the exact size of a cell. Three renderings: the scene’s own colours, a terminal’s green or amber, white on black with a palette accent on the contours.

On every beat a wave of brightness crosses the grid; treble makes isolated characters flicker like a glitching terminal; the camera moves on every bar, and strong bars enlarge the cells. Every phrase the scene and the rendering change: the characters roll over in a wave, each cell cycling through a few random signs before the new one. In build-ups the cells shrink and the image turns fine; on the drop, giant cells for one bar, then back. For techno, electro, drum and bass, IDM and bass music.