The thing I love about creative people is that just when I think I’ve seen it all, they do something that never even crossed my mind. Such is the case with this very unusual and very cool time-lapse of New York City that completely blurs the line between day and night.

I honestly thought I had seen all the time-lapse variations, but this clever variation from Julian Tryba proved me wrong. Using some incredibly intricate and careful masking, Tryba allowed different times of day and night to flash across different buildings, but didn’t stop there. Next, each building was assigned a unique mathematical equation and parameters that told it which time of day to display, often using random sinusoidal functions to create oscillations within each building in addition to the global behavior (think of this as a shimmer). Finally, the video was linked up with a beat map of a piece of music to coordinate to changes in the sound, creating the amazing final product you see above. Tryba did this once before with Boston, but the automation is new to the process. The result is something akin to the buildings of New York City becoming a visual drum set.

[via Gizmodo]