The process of these animated soundscapes often begins with the music. I tend to find a track I connect with immediately, one that clicks on first listen. I’ll loop it a few times and start imagining how it might move if visualised. This part is abstract, immersive, and felt: a mood-driven translation of music into form and motion. While each weave is mostly created in a single sitting, where the core movements are established, I sometimes revisit the piece the next day to refine the animation, polish transitions, or improve rhythm and flow. The approach is predominantly spontaneous but includes moments of quiet reflection and adjustment. Animating in Looom allows me to work intuitively by layering lines and shapes in rhythmic cycles, often drawing in a straight-ahead manner. This method is rooted in my background in traditional 2D hand-drawn animation. I’m not planning key poses as you would in a pose-to-pose method; instead, I’m feeling the music through drawing, letting motion emerge organically. It’s a meditative and embodied practice, fuelled by the interplay between instinct and rhythm. While most of the weaves develop and evolve through natural exploration, I’ve also explored a more analytical approach: planning a sequence of threads across a fixed number of frames, using the music’s BPM to inform timing. I’ve tested combinations of binary rhythms (even-note intervals like 2s, 4s, and 8s) and polyrhythms (like 3s, 5s, or 7s), as well as dualities between even and odd frame counts, with the intention of weaving together a satisfying rhythmic structure. In Looom, note count options sometimes include variants marked with a 3 or 5, offering a polyrhythmic interpretation of that note value. I experiment with these against varying frame counts (with higher frame counts making for a more interesting loop). The way Looom handles rhythmic duality and varying frame counts means it can take several cycles before everything aligns again, which can produce loops that are hypnotic and visually compelling. This interaction between overlapping rhythms and unsynced cycles creates a kind of phasing effect, where slight offsets evolve gradually, adding subtle complexity to the loop. But despite their mathematical elegance, these analytically built loops often feel less alive. I think it’s because they don’t allow space for nuance—those subtle shifts in emphasis, swing, and groove that give music its emotional signature. Since music is as much about feel as it is about quantised beats, when that feel is missing, a loop might look engaging, but it can feel a bit disconnected from the spirit of the track. Sometimes, a happy accident emerges where I animate to one song, but another track with a similar mood and tempo ends up fitting better. I’ll then refine the animation to match the new song, adjusting timing and movement to get a good visual alignment with the sound. It’s a reminder of how much the music informs the visual, and how structured planning can block this more fluid and exploratory process. Discovering Looom in 2022 opened up a playground for me to combine two things I love: music and animation. It’s taken me on a slow and rewarding journey of creative discovery. I initially began with a few experimental loops where the app intrigued me, but it wasn’t until mid 2023 that I reconnected with it in a meaningful way. I began editing them in post, making intentional colour changes to different elements of the animation that correspond to specific beats or accents in the track. These shifts in colour and brightness help heighten visual texture, and gently reinforce the beat. It became a way to echo and respond to the dynamics of the music—like a secondary rhythm made of light. That period led to one of my favourite creations: a loop set to Lunar Cycles by Sleepyfish, which I shared online as part of my first set of published loops. It marked the beginning of a more deliberate exploration of this medium. In 2024, my creative momentum slowed. I returned to the practice earlier this year after a period of feeling stagnant and disconnected from my artistic direction. That reconnection felt really affirming. I realised that animating to music in this way wasn’t just something I enjoyed; it aligned with an authentic sense of expression. It showed me that when joy and intuition align, they often point to something meaningful—something worth returning to and exploring further. That understanding now shapes how I create.