Audio visualiser

A waveform bouncing across the frame, a circle pulsing around album art, bars rising and falling with the bass: all of it is one trick, an animation driven by the amplitude or frequency of the audio track. Music channels, podcast clips and audio-only videos use it because YouTube is still a video player, and a static image for forty minutes gives the eye nothing to do. Most editors can generate one and templates cover the rest. The mistake is asking it to do more than it can: a visualiser holds the frame together and creates no interest the audio lacks. Captions or cut-in text usually earn the space ahead of it.