I've been struggling with trying to get started with touchdesigner now for over a week - everything I've tried has failed - usually bringing my laptop to its knees and producing crackly/distorted audio. Today I found Matthew Ragan's examples and was able to get this audio-reactive visualization running and fed yesterday's music excerpt into it.
This gives me hope that I can make this work in a more general way and ought to devote some brain cells to learning how to abuse/tweak it. First step was to reproduce the demo component by component in a new project to ensure I more or less understand what's going on and that there is no hidden config I'm not aware of. It works…
This reminds me a lot of modular synthesis. Same sort of conceptual framework (simple components that take inputs and produce outputs and can be modulated by other signals) with very little constraint on how to connect things up. And the corresponding lack of guardrails and ease of boxing yourself into a corner you can't find a way out of…
Strangely, I'm growing to like this music more after listening to it in what should have been an annoying loop while farting around with these graphics. Go figure :)