The Brain: one signal, followed from the whole brain to the synapse

Every look of the visualizer is the same signal seen at a different scale: The Connectome, The Connectogram, Brain Tissue, The Neuron, The Synapse and Brainwaves. Open it from its template page, in Classic or Studio, as the look of a Timeline clip, or as a layer over another look; the preview, the still and every export draw the same frames.

The beat starts the signal and it runs one tract a beat along its pathway's route, region to region. In the connectome you see it cross the hemisphere; in the connectogram the same hop lights a curve across the ring; in the tissue the neurons of the region it reaches fire in their layers; the neuron shows the spike running down one axon; the synapse shows what happens at its end; and on the scalp the region it reaches warms its electrode. A small hemisphere in the corner of every moment shows where the signal is in the whole brain.

• Open the The Brain template

Each look is one moment of the signal's journey:

• The Connectome: The left hemisphere from the side with its white-matter tracts as fibre bundles: the arcuate fasciculus, the cingulum, the corpus callosum, the corticospinal tract and more. The signal runs the pathway a tract a beat, lighting each region it reaches, and on the drop every tract lights in a wave from the brainstem up.
• The Connectogram: The brain's regions round a ring, the left hemisphere down one side and the right down the other, each lobe its colour, the connections curving across the middle; the bars inside are your song's spectrum and the pathway's links light hop by hop.
• Brain Tissue: A section from the bone down: the dura, the arachnoid's web across the fluid with an artery and a vein, the pia, the cortex's six layers with their neurons, astrocytes on the capillaries and the white matter. Neurons fire in their layers on the beat.
• The Neuron: One neuron: dendrites gathering inputs, the cell body, the myelinated axon and its terminals. On every beat an action potential jumps node to node down the axon while a scope traces the spike to +40 mV.
• The Synapse: A terminal and a spine across the cleft: on every beat calcium flows in, vesicles fuse and release their transmitter, it crosses the cleft and the receptors open.
• Brainwaves: A head with its nineteen electrodes and a map across the scalp, a montage of traces and the five bands: your song's spectrum read as delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma.

It is drawn from the anatomy textbooks. Twenty regions, from the prefrontal cortex to the brainstem, are joined by the white-matter tracts that really join them: association fibres within a hemisphere (the arcuate fasciculus between the two language areas, the superior and inferior longitudinal fasciculi, the uncinate, the cingulum and the short U-fibres between neighbouring folds), the corpus callosum between the hemispheres, and the projection fibres to and from the thalamus, the brainstem and the cerebellum. Every region is reached by a tract and the tracts join all twenty into one network.

The tissue is a section from the bone down: the dura mater, the arachnoid's web across the fluid, the pia, the cortex's six layers with their neurons, astrocytes on the capillaries and the white matter's fibres. The rhythms use the nineteen electrodes of the international 10-20 system and the five bands, delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma, each drawn in its own range of hertz at the reference tempo.

The Pathway setting picks the signal's route: language (hearing a word and saying it), vision (seeing and reaching), movement, memory or emotion, or Rotate for a new one each section of your song. Each beat the signal runs the next tract and arrives just before the next beat; on the drop every tract of the hemisphere lights in a wave from the brainstem up over the drop's first bar. In the synapse each beat releases transmitter, in the neuron each beat fires a spike, and in Brainwaves your song's spectrum becomes the bands, the bass as delta up to the highs as gamma.

Every phrase starts the route again, so with no song analysis a phrase-long clip starts and ends on the same frame and loops without a seam.

It is a picture of how the brain is connected, never a medical image: no injury, illness, diagnosis or treatment, and no claim that a song does anything to anyone's brain. The rhythms are your song's, drawn as the brain's bands, never a reading of anyone. Regions are named by their anatomy and what they do; the language areas and the gaps in the myelin keep their textbook names, Broca's and Wernicke's areas and the nodes of Ranvier, and no person, project or company is named.

Signals here are motion, not flashes: each glow is small and travels, the drop's wave rises over a beat, and every light goes through the flash limiter first, which holds flashes to fewer than three a second. The cerebellum's folds, the ring's segments, the cortex's layers and the white matter's fibres, the myelin's segments, the rows of channels and receptors and the traces' grid are repeating patterns, so each asks the site's pattern guard how much contrast it may have. The Contrast setting lowers it all further.

Beside the colours, speed, glow and the settings every look has, the visualizer has its own, labelled the same in every editor, and SW Agent can set each one by its name:

• Pathway: The route the signal runs, a tract a beat: language (hearing a word and saying it), vision (seeing and reaching), movement, memory or emotion, or Rotate for a new one each section of the song. Choose Rotate, Language, Vision, Movement, Memory or Emotion.
• Firing: How busy the network is: more signals along other tracts, more neurons firing in the tissue, more vesicles released at the synapse, louder rhythms. From 0 to 1.5.
• Signal light: How bright the signal and the glows are. It rises with the song and never flashes. From 0 to 2.
• Rendering: How it is drawn: Neon (glowing on the dark), Scan (a scan's greys with the tracts in the diffusion colour code, a stained section in the tissue) or Atlas (an anatomy plate). Choose Neon, Scan or Atlas.
• Fibres: How many fibres a tract draws, how many weaker connections the ring shows, how many axons run in the white matter and how far the dendrites branch. From 0 to 1.
• Labels: How many labels: the regions and tracts, the layers and the meninges, the parts of the neuron and the synapse, the electrodes, and the locator that shows where the signal is in the whole brain. 0 shows none. From 0 to 1.
• Sparks: Sparks drifting in the light and the fluid, and the puff where the signal arrives on the beat. From 0 to 1.
• Variation: Another brain of the same story: the folds of the cortex, the neurons in the tissue, the dendrites' branches. The same number always gives the same. From 0 to 99.

Layer assets and the Layers tool offer each moment's own layers (the cortex, the tracts, the regions, the signal, the ring, the meninges and cells, the dendrites and axon, the synapse's parts, the head, the scalp map and the traces) on their own, to add to any project. Motion graphics has every moment as a design to customize, and the Stream studio has it in its rotation.

• Browse Layer assets

Ask for it in your own words: "make a brain visualizer", "neurons firing to my song", "a synapse video" or "brain waves for my track", and SW Agent builds the project on it. In an open project, say "switch to the connectogram", "follow the language pathway" or "turn the labels off"; each change is one step of undo in Classic and in Studio.

Through our MCP server, get_engine lists the visualizer's moments and settings, and build_editor_setup opens Classic or Studio on any of them.