Jonathan Berkey psots a look at using the old-school audio spectrum effect in After Effects to create some complex animations easily, breaking down some of the techniques he used in a recent project.

so here I show how I used audio spectrum to drive some pretty sweet and complex animations in a recent project

Jonathan walks through some of the options of the Audio Spectrum Plugin, and then demonstrates what is possible with some experimentation extending its capabilities by pairing it with shape layers, and provides some practical examples as well.