I''m looking to read up on creating those cool effects (as seen in Windows Media Player), but I have no idea of what ''term'' I should be searching for... Anyone know what these techniques are called (or even a site with some theory about them)?

check the DX SDK on how to do that stuff. There''s a sample in there.

I am guessing about this: Basically I think you get the amplitude of different frequencies, and you''re free to do whatever you feel like with them.

I''m kind of more interested in the maths/formulas behind the actual placement of pixels/colours rather than the influence of the sound.
I was hoping someone new of a place where they ran over these kind of effects (giving some maths ideas for different effects).

You can achieve similar effects by doing something like:

- Draw coloured waveform to a buffer
- Apply a quick filter to the buffer
- Repeat

For filter.. is there were your imagination goes. You can, as example, copy the buffer and draw this copy it back onto the buffer in a slightly scaled up quad, with 50% blend. That''ll give simply a accumulative zooming blur effect.

Hmm... Well not really Radial Blur specifically, but that would fall under the kinds of things I''m looking for...

Basically, I''m looking for a way to deform bitmap images in all sorts of odd ways. So that if I gradually deformed a bitmap, then linked all of the newly formed bitmaps into an AVI file, I''d end up with a cool effect.

For example, I may have a bitmap with nothing but the colour blue. I then start to manipulate the shades of blue with some influencing color (maybe white) in a way so that it looks like the rippling of water.

I was hoping someone would know of a place where I could find techniques to do this kind of thing effectively. I''m confident I could come up with some dodgy looking effects, but I''d like to see how the professional looking ones are implemented.