2026 Unreal Fest Resources Coming Soon! Thank you for your patience!

Unreal Audio Reactive Visual Techniques

Hello, welcome to the examples page which has links to the Unreal Project displaying many audio reactive techniques with Niagara, the Quartz Visual Plugin standalone, and the wave cutter script. These are all available free and I hope to expand this into a much nicer format in the future as I share with the community. If you find this useful, please check out Mix Universe on Steam which uses it all in a really cool musical sandbox experience.

Play Mix Universe!

Check out the Example Project!

Quartz Examples included in the audio example project.
Spectrum visual examples included in the audio example project.

What's in it?

For Mix Universe, sounds are built on the fly and rely heavily on the builder API using a custom builder subsystem.

Compatible with Unreal 5.8, a full example project that has
6 levels

  • Spectrum Visual Examples

  • Quartz Stable Example

  • Quartz Visuals

  • Using the MetaSound Builder Basics

  • Using the MetaSound Builder Systematically

  • Using the MetaSound Builder the way Mix Universe uses it!

    Includes 3 Zuko Media plugins

  • ZMAudio - Has everything for the Metasound builder api the exact way Mix Universe has it.

  • ZMQuartzVisuals - Has everything for the quartz visuals

  • ZMSlateIM - Allows visualizing the MetaSound Builder runtime

    Load up the project, go to main menu and click around to play each level. Then explore the content for how everything is setup and working.
    Note there is no documentation other than blueprint comments and poking around the levels in the example project or source code.

Video from Unreal fest is still pending upload.

Download the example project

Open source · Plugin

The Quartz Visuals Plugin (Standalone)

This plugin is open source! Maybe one day Epic will integrate something like this directly into quartz. For now, this does the trick for queuing up beat synchronized visual pulses that can interpolate using curves.

Get the plugin

C# Script

The C# Wave Splitter Script

This script you can use to drag and drop any wav file onto in order to quickly split it into multiple wav files. This was developed originally by https://twitter.com/JoostDevBlog be sure to check out Robo Maestro as well.

Get WaveCutter

GitHub PR

The Github Pull Request for adding Constant Q to Audio Synesthesia Realtime FFT Analyzer.

The pull request adding Constant Q to the Audio Synesthesia realtime FFT analyzer.

View pull request

Presentation

The presentation slides from GDC

If you want the full slides from my GDC talk, you can download them here! If you have vault access, you can also watch the presentation here .

Download slides

Unreal Fest 2026

Unreal Fest 2026 slides

The slide deck from my 2026 Unreal Fest talk on audio-reactive visual techniques in Unreal Engine.

Download slides

The Future.

If there are things you would like to see on this page, please comment them below and I can expand the projects to include certain things. This is all done in my free time, so I appreciate any support either through gumroad or Mix Universe.