Xander Steenbrugge shared his latest work on LinkedIn yesterday, and I was completely stunned!

Xander had been working on, what he called, a “fun side-project”, but which was in my eyes, absolutely awesome. He had used two generative adversarial networks (GANs) to teach one another how to respond visually to changing audio cues.

This resulted in the generation of stunning audio-visual fanatasy worlds that are complete brain porn. You just can’t stop staring. So much is happening in these video’s; everything looks familiar, whereas nothing really represent anything realistic. There’s always a sliver of reality before the visual shapes morph to their next form.

Have a look yourself at the video’s on Xander’s new Youtube channel “Neural Synesthesia“ dedicated to this project. The videos are also hosted here on Vimeo, where they are rendered in higher resolution even.

This is my favorite video, but there are more below.

Amazing how the image responds to changes in the music, right? I suspect Xander let’s the algorithm traverse some latent space with spaces that are determined by the bass, trebble, and other audio-cues.

The audio behind the above video is also just enticing. The track is called Raindrops, by Kupla X j’san.

Here’s another one of Xander’s videos, with the same audio track as background:

But Xander didn’t limit his GANs to generating landscapes and still paintings, but he also dared to do some human faces. These also turned out amazing.

Both the left and right face seem to start out in about the same position/seed in the latent space, but traverse in different, though still similar directions, morphing into all kinds of reaslistic and more alien forms. The result is simply out of this world!

The music behind this video is by Phantom Studies, by Dettmann | Klock.

Curious to see where this project and others head as we continue to see development in this GAN field. This must turn the world of design and art up side down in the coming decade…

A beautiful machine-generated still from the Neural Synthesia videos (link)