ANDY O'MEARA IS currently qualifying as a submarine officer aboard the attack sub USS Jefferson City. A twenty-four-year-old Cornell grad, O'Meara has an unlikely part-time gig on the side: He's the author of G-Force and WhiteCap, two of the most popular visual plug-ins for MP3 players like WinAmp and iTunes. While most of his life consists of training aboard the home-ported Jefferson City, the rest is spent unleashing psychedelic eye candy on millions of computer screens across the world.

And if O'Meara's day job isn't surprising enough, consider this: He's also a devout Christian. O'Meara's fascinating and confessional site -- where you can also download his software for free -- talks openly about the religious inspiration behind his coding. (G-Force is short for "Godforce.") Before you even start thinking about the software itself, there's something perplexing about the mix of sensibilities you encounter in the guy. Take these four statements, culled from his "About Andy" page:

Retired admiral Stockdale is an impressive man with some impressive credentials. Someone who spent 7 years in a not-so-humane Hanoi war prison may have something to say about leadership under fire.

So indescribable -- when a certain pattern of electronica plays on parts of you so deep it's impossible to describe in words. It's mainly dance/trance/techno that does this to me (Paul Van Dyk, Sash!, Cafe Del Mar, Delirium, Kai Tracid, Moby, Dune, and a zillion others).

I'm Christian: I believe in Jesus, that He died and rose again, and that if you follow His teachings and acknowledge Christ (as the Bible describes) then God will grant you eternal life.

Characters and artists with whom I identify most are: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, the main character in Gladiator, the character Roy in Blade Runner, Emily Dickinson and her works...

Maybe I'm out of touch with what the kids are doing these days, but I confess that this psychographic niche -- the Christian, free-software-writing, Emily Dickinson-identifying raver on the attack sub -- was new to me. Perhaps he is a sign of the future. A few days after I began corresponding with O'Meara, I happened to be at a party in downtown Manhattan that featured a performance by DJ Spooky -- and sure enough he was using G-Force for the visuals during his set. Seeing those spirals and fractals churning on the oversized screens, as the bass thundered through my chest, I couldn't help laughing at the thought that these ecstatic images had originated on the USS Jefferson City. Not since a certain Beatles film of the late sixties has the world of audio/visual experimentation collided so forcefully with the world of submarines.

SIX MILLION TIMES someone has opted to download one of O'Meara's applications since he first released WhiteCap in 1999. And while it sometimes seems as though there are almost as many visual plug-ins on the market, G-Force in particular has established itself as one of the leading "visual enhancers" for the MP3-listening public. (Apple recently bundled it as the default plug-in for their acclaimed iTunes product.) Spend a few minutes with the software running alongside a favorite disk and you'll instantly see why: While many plug-ins cycle through repetitive patterns, in G-Force the screen morphs almost seamlessly from one radically different configuration (called "configs") to another, shifting from organic, pulsing blobs to spinning wire-frames to effects that defy classification. (Imagine triggering the Star Wars "hyperspace" effect while navigating through a galaxy of exploding fireworks.)

The most intriguing thing about software like G-Force is that the images it produces are in a real sense set to the music. They are not random slide shows -- many of the configs that come with G-Force alter their behavior in response to the changing waveforms of the audio signal. The conjunction is immediately apparent to first-time viewers: a sudden shift from muted strings to a roaring brass section might release a swarm of pixels, while the rest of the visuals pulse in lockstep with the percussion section. Years ago the philosopher of consciousness Thomas Nagel published a now-classic essay called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" I think software like G-Force gives us a clue: sound patterns translated into spatial information. You're listening to a song, and not flying through a cave, of course, but it's hard to think of another media experience where sound and image are more organically intertwined. Music videos have been wrapping themselves around pop songs since the days of "Video Killed the Radio Star," but that wrapping was an extra layer that required sentient humans to individually "interpret" each song. G-Force does its interpretations on the fly. The images you see are just another way of looking at the sound data.

At first glance, those images might remind you of the last time you took peyote and spent a long evening with Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But it's possible that the plug-in diaspora might be bad news for the hallucinogen providers. "I believe video to music acts as a multiplier to an otherwise purely audio experience like the way say, heroin, brings a new dimension to otherwise normal perception," O'Meara explained to me, in an email correspondence. "In this way, we do experience a new form of content from visualized music because the end product is a compound of music and video, not just a mixture." If part of the quest of psychedelia is trying to experience a synesthetic blurring of aural and visual information, then G-Force's pulsing waveforms give you a significant head start. Indeed, the first thing I thought when I saw G-Force is that the software was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to dorm-room stoners. But after a few minutes, I found myself thinking: Why even bother with the drugs? G-Force does acid better than acid.