Morph from audio waveform to text

[DavidacrossAmerica]

I have part of a logo that is text in a png format that I want to respond to music by becoming a wave form, and then return to the word/text when the music stops. I applied the audio waveform to get a nice response to the musical cue, but cannot find a way to get the waveform to morph back into the word. The timeline keyframing available doesn't allow for this in any way I can find. The waveform can only fade out or be turned on and off. I'm sure there is a way to do this, but I'm not sure if there is a simple way or not. Any suggestions?

[Mylenium]

This is simply a completely manual process where whatever paths, strokes and morph effects have to be animated by hand and have nothing at all to do with the audio animation. That's one of those "sounds simple on paper" things that is actually a lot of work and may ultimately end up looking terribly cheesy or alltogether terrible from a design standpoint if not meticulously executed. If you provide a screenshot of how it looks we may be able to advise here and there, but honestly my gut feeling is that it may not look good at all and is just a bad idea.

Mylenium

[DavidacrossAmerica]

Thanks. I think it may indeed be very tedious to do, but I don't think it would look cheesy if done well. It's a fairly common idea--the music (bass in particular)--causes the image, or word in this case, to respond to the loudness of the beat. There's not much to screenshot, but here's the word with the option enabled to allow compositing on original so you see both. There's no way to morph between the word and waveform I can figure out. 

[Mylenium]

Making a word pump using scale animation is a different thing than actually morphing it. The former is as trivial as connecting an audio output converted to keyframes using the keyframe assistant to the scale property, the latter would still require different procedures as per your initial convoluted description. And then of course you could be refering to making the waves appear inside the text or masking the waves, which would be equally simple to achieve with basic track mattes. I'm still not certain what it actually is that you want.

Mylenium

[DavidacrossAmerica]

Thanks. Since you find my description convoluted, I'll work this out myself. 

[Rick Gerard]

You've got a couple of options. You could color correct a copy of your logo if necessary to let AutoTrace create some useful masks, edit the audio and pre-compose it to get a usable waveform, then apply Audio Waveform and/or Audio Spectrum to get something like this:

Or you could use Video Copilot's Saber and convert Audio to Keyframes to generate a fancier waveform by animating many of the properties in Saber to create a magical outline, or you could just use Turbulent displace or any other distortion effect to displace the logo using the Animating with Audio techniques I describe in this tutorial:

It all depends on what kind of effect you are looking for. I would probably go with something like turbulent displace on top of Saber unless I wanted something that was very cartoony.

[DavidacrossAmerica]

Thanks Rick. Some good directions to consider there. I'll play around and see where it takes me and report back, fyi.