The Instrument

Vivid is one macOS app with two halves that share a single project: a DAW-style Session View for sound, and a rewireable visual node graph for picture. A mapping bridge binds them, so what you play becomes what you see. This page is the how it works, after the vision has landed - if you just want to feel it, watch the Gallery.

Session View - the musical half

A familiar timeline of tracks, clips, scenes, instruments, effects and a mixer. Load Surge XT or any VST3/CLAP plugin, write parts, arrange scenes. It is a real sequencer, not a toy - and every note, every level, every transient it produces is available to drive the picture.

The visual node graph - the picture half

A live graph of visual operators: real geometry, shaders, particles, compositing. You build it, rewire it, and fork it like code while it runs. Operators are typed nodes with parameters and ports; the edges are the signal path. Nothing here is a fixed pipeline - the graph is the instrument, and it is yours to rearrange mid-performance.

The mapping bridge - sound becomes picture

The bridge is what makes Vivid an instrument rather than two apps in a trench coat. Musical and control signals (a bassline, a transient, an envelope, a clock) map onto visual parameters through typed control edges. The bassline swells a metaball; a kick bursts a particle field; a bar-locked clock cuts between scenes. It runs both ways: visual state can drive audio back.

Author your own - code and AI over MCP

The built-in operators are teaching examples. The real product is the plumbing: when a look doesn't exist yet, you write it. Author operators as project-local WGSL shaders or compiled C++ nodes, edit them live, break them and recover using Vivid's own diagnostics.

And every operation in Vivid is exposed over MCP - so an AI agent is a first-class collaborator that can author, inspect, modify and verify a whole project alongside you, not just nudge a knob. This is the deepest part of the story; it is where "grasp the vision" becomes "make your own." Start in Learn.

Fork it - a project is a folder you own

A Vivid project is a portable folder: the session, the graph, the mappings, and your custom operators, saved together. Take it, change it, run it anywhere. There is no lock-in and no cloud round-trip - download the app and open your first project.