, available in 1976. The unit never gained enough popularity and was in production for only a year. The first electronic music visualizer was the
Atari Video Music introduced by
Atari Inc. in 1977, and designed by the initiator of the home version of
Pong, Robert Brown. The idea was to create a visual exploration that could be implemented into a
Hi-Fi stereo system. In the
United Kingdom music visualization was first pioneered by
Fred Judd. Music and audio players were available on early home computers, with some possessing visualization features, such as
Sound to Light Generator (1985, Infinite Software), which used the
ZX Spectrum's cassette player. The 1984 movie
Electric Dreams prominently made use of a music visualizer, although as a pre-generated effect, rather than calculated in real-time. For
IBM PC compatibles, one of the first music visualization programs was the
open-source, multi-platform
Cthugha, written in 1993. In the 1990s, the
tracker music scene, which originated on the
Amiga, used real-time techniques for music visualization with programs such as
Cubic Player (1994),
Inertia Player (1995), as well as elaborate audio/visual experiences from the
demoscene. Computer music visualization became widespread in the mid to late 1990s as applications such as
Winamp (1997),
Audion (1999), and
SoundJam (2000). By 1999, there were several dozen
freeware music visualizers in distribution. In particular,
MilkDrop (2001) and its predecessor "geiss-plugin" (1998) by
Ryan Geiss,
G-Force by
Andy O'Meara, and
AVS (2000) by
Nullsoft became popular music visualizations. AVS is part of
Winamp and has been recently
open-sourced, and G-Force was licensed for use in
iTunes and
Windows Media Center and is presently the flagship product for Andy O'Meara's software startup company, SoundSpectrum. In 2008, iTunes added the "Magnetosphere" visualizer created by
The Barbarian Group. == Use by the deaf community ==