Still Night: Play Van Gogh's Starry Night as a WebGL Instrument

Most music visualizers are listeners. Still Night is an instrument. Joshua Garcia rebuilt Van Gogh's Starry Night as a point cloud and wired the entire canvas to sound. The usual deal is that pictures react to sound. Here it runs the other way. You play the painting, and the painting makes the music.

The build is the fun part. Garcia placed the particles with Floyd-Steinberg dithering, so bright areas crowd with points and dark areas thin out, which means the painting's own light becomes its particle budget. Segment Anything slices the canvas into five regions, and each one gets its own motion and its own voice in a Tone.js orchestra: reverb in one, a phaser in another, noise and delay coloring the edges while oscillators carry the notes. A real-time analyzer reads each region's audio and feeds it back into the visuals, so the loop closes and motion stops feeling adjacent to sound and starts feeling like the same gesture. Go play it. Read the case study, open the repo and look at how the flow field was hand-painted, because that little detail is doing most of the quiet work.