TERMINAL AUDIO · COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
neurafly
Real audio in, real neurons firing, real time. A terminal visualizer wired to the actual FlyWire whole-brain connectome.
138,333 leaky integrate-and-fire neurons and 2,052,622 weighted synapses from FlyWire release v783, rendered as a living disk in braille using your terminal's own palette.
Problem
Audio visualizers synthesize shapes from frequency data. The motion looks organic but carries no structure: bars, particles, and waveforms driven by the same FFT numbers. neurafly instead couples live system audio to a real biological wiring diagram, so activity propagates, reverberates, and decays through genuine fly-brain topology.
Key decisions
Real connectome, not a model
Wiring comes from FlyWire release v783: 138,333 neurons and 2,052,622 weighted synapses. Inhibitory sign follows presynaptic neurotransmitter probabilities (GABA inhibitory, the rest excitatory).
cava-style band processing
A 2048-point FFT folds into 24 logarithmic bands, each judged against its own rolling spectral floor, with equal-loudness EQ, auto-gain, and a peakiness gate.
Fixed-tick pipeline
Four modules (audio, sim, figure, canvas) share a fixed 100 Hz simulation tick, so each band injects current into its own neuron subset deterministically.
Terminal-native rendering
A float phosphor buffer at 2x4 sub-cell resolution folds into braille, and colors come exclusively from ANSI 30-37 so the disk adopts the user's theme.
Results
Tradeoffs
- ·Linux only (PipeWire/PulseAudio) and a terminal with Unicode braille support
- ·The 18 MB connectome is excluded from the published crate, which falls back to a synthetic network
- ·Regenerating the network needs the Zenodo feather file and the Python preprocessing tooling