All work

No. 001

Kintsugi

A figure in water, drawn only by sound

Track
DROELOE “Kintsugi”
Date
Format
9:16 · 1080×1920 · 30 s
Watch with sound on Instagram (opens in a new tab)

Concept

A human figure floats in dark water, and the only thing that reveals it is sound. About seventy thin white lines run edge to edge across a black vertical frame. Outside the figure they stay calm and drift with slow waves; inside its silhouette they bend with the waveform of DROELOE’s “Kintsugi”, so the body exists only where the music disturbs the lines. Nothing is outlined and nothing is filled in.

Light falls from above and fades with depth. Bubbles rise from the head and push the lines aside on their way up, while the figure itself slowly drifts through the frame. It is a 30-second excerpt of the track (1:29–1:59), rendered as an audio-reactive music visualizer in TouchDesigner for an Instagram Reel.

How it’s made

Network / TouchDesigner

Everything you see is one GLSL TOP in TouchDesigner, driven by CHOPs that analyze the track in real time.

  1. Lines. ~70 horizontal lines, each drawn edge to edge by the fragment shader. Inside the figure mask a line is displaced by the low-passed waveform plus noise scaled by loudness; outside the mask it only follows the water.
  2. Audio to texture. The track goes from Audio File In to mono, through a low-pass filter, and is written into a waveform texture that the shader samples along each line. Low-passing keeps the line motion smooth rather than jittery.
  3. Loudness. RMS of the signal, smoothed with a Lag, gives a single level value that controls how strongly the figure’s lines react.
  4. Water. Slow simplex-noise waves, stronger near the surface and weaker in depth, plus a depth fade and light rays from above.
  5. Figure mask. Made from a reference photo: crop, threshold, blur, clean up, soft edge. The soft edge lets the waveform fade in at the silhouette instead of switching on hard. The mask drifts slowly so the figure never sits still.
  6. Bubbles. A separate GLSL pass simulates bubbles rising from the head and writes a displacement field; the line shader reads that field and pushes the lines aside around each bubble.
  7. Output. Vertical 9:16 for Reels, encoded with FFmpeg; on this site it plays as a silent 720×1280 loop.

Tools

  • TouchDesigner
  • GLSL
  • FFmpeg

Credits

SH01 · 001
  • Music DROELOE, “Kintsugi”. Excerpt 1:29–1:59. All rights to the track belong to the artist and rights holders.
  • Visuals Oleg Sharshakov / SH01. Made in TouchDesigner with GLSL, 9 October 2026.
  • Sound This site shows a silent loop. The version with sound is on Instagram: watch the Reel on @sh01.io.