YouTube is now the largest music-streaming service. Facebook lets you post videos, but not audio. Many musicians get around this by posting non-moving movies consisting of a stereo music track and a picture of an album cover. But what if music could become the foundation for dynamic, compelling video? That could make the whole audio chain more popular.

Imagine a visualizer driven by a combination of audio metadata, DSP, and artificial intelligence…perhaps even influenced by other sensor inputs. Instead of wiggling wireframes, this system could approach cinematic storytelling. And not just in video, but AR and VR as well.

What hooks could we add to audio files to generate more immersive visuals? What are the opportunities in production and delivery? And why are people who imagine the future called visionaries?

Footnote: Creative Labs did some groundbreaking work on music visualization back in 1999 with Lava/Oozic. The system used a proprietary file format and web player, and it died around the dot-com crash, but there were some ambitious ideas in there.