Since I’m doing my final project in the typography and speech visualization space, I thought this project was relevant.

TypeStar by Scott Gamer
He doesn’t say but I think it uses timed lyric data to create a kinetic typography visualization with a bunch of “preset visualization schemes.” Asked to make a kinetic type piece (see youtube) but instead made this software that generates kinetic type pieces.

This seems like a really useful tool, as audio-synced motion pieces can be a real pain to create. Imagine instead just finding the lyrics to a song online, and using a simple Processing app to record mouseclicks everytime each word is sung, quickly generating a file with timestamps for each word. With a timestamped lyric file and the mp3 file, you can get an infinite gallery of live visualizations to visually see what works right away. From there you could make a more fine tuned “canned” piece, with some editing and post processing work. Or, the results could be generative and not canned at all, you could generate timestamped files for a whole playlist and have the visualizations play on a large display at a party or club, if you wanted to go crazy you could even use amazon turk to get large amounts of timestamped lyric files.

–edit–
Apparently it uses “UltraStar” text files, I don’t have a clue what those are, but the Processing app I described above would do the same thing.