whitney music box - var. 0 - chromatic - 48 tines

in three minutes, the largest dot will travel around the circle once, the next largest dot will travel around the circle twice, the next largest dot three times, and so on.

the dots are arranged to trigger notes on a chromatic scale when they pass the line

the music was generated using my own syd synthesis software, the animation was programmed in Processing

A musical realization of the motion graphics of John Whitney as described in his book "digital harmony"

Animation and music by Jim Bumgardner of krazydad.com and the wheel of lunch. Jim makes free puzzles, including sudoku, killer sudoku, kakuro, mazes, and thousands of other puzzles.


Music box variations:

var. 0 - chromatic - 48 tines
var. 1 - harmonics of 55hz
var. 2 - harmonics of 20hz
var. 3 - harmonics of 48hz, reversed
var. 4 - harmonics of 48hz, palindrome
var. 5 - chromatic - 88 tines
var. 6 - microtones
var. 7 - harmonics - 120 tines, reversed
var. 8 - chromatic - 88 organ pipes, rev.
var. 9 - chromatic - 88 bars, rev.
var. 10 - chromatic - 64 pipe crypto calliope
var. 11 - minute waltz - 60 keys, 60 seconds
var. 12 - chromatic - prime numbers only
var. 13 - chromatic - non-primes only
var. 14 - stereo
var. 15 - stereo - 120
var. 16 - stereo - 210
var. 17 - hand cranked
var. 18 - stereo drone
var. 19 - stereo sonar
var. 20 - bell carol

Creative Commons License
Whitney Music Box by Jim Bumgardner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

More detailed information can be found in this post

Here is a git repository of sample source code / reference implementations in a variety of languages, including Flash/Actionscript, ChucK, Pure Data (PD), SuperCollider, Nyquist, pyo, Processing, Perl, and Syd. You'll also find MIDI files in there. Email me if you'd like to contribute.

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