Lyric Background Videos using Music Visualization and VJ Tools

I have a hard time coming up with good visual backgrounds to go along with song lyrics. It seems like it’s easy to find backgrounds that are either boring, irrelevant, or distracting.

For a couple of years I’ve been thinking there has to be some way to have dynamically created animations to use as song backgrounds. Several months ago I came across some Quartz Composer animations that were controlled via sound. But, I hadn’t been able to figure out how to use any of these animations in real time with our presentation software.

So, finally last week I decided I was going to experiment with using some sound triggered Quartz Composer animations for song backgrounds. After a few hours I finally setup a video camera to capture my Mac’s screen animation and feed the video into our presentation software via a live firewire feed. It was clunky and awkward to control, but it worked and looked nice. Unfortunately, I only really found one useful Quartz Composer animation to use, Soundstream. So, I’m not ready to put it into regular use, but I proved it was worth exploring some more.

So, has anyone else used any music visualization or VJ software to create song backgrounds? Any advice you can share?