(site-wide visits since 14/05/2005)
Trochor
Animated Virtual Harmonograph
Have fun, play around with the settings; that's probably the best way of
figuring out what's going on.
It's pretty hard to give a concise description of it in English.
So far, the best I've come up with is to say that it's two interacting ellipses,
a bit like a spirograph.
'Eccentricity', by the way, is a measure of how non-circular an ellipse is
- an ellipse with 0 eccentricity is a circle, one with 1 is a line.
The Long Version
I first stumbled on trochoids by playing around with plotting trigonometric
functions.
I wondered what would happen if you took the basic parametric equations for
plotting a circle -
x = radius * cos (q)
y = radius * sin (q)
- and added them to the equation for another circle, turning more than one
circle in the time it takes to draw the first one,
so we get something like the trails left by a point on a wheel rolling around
another wheel (an epitrochoid
or hypotrochoid),
with these equations:
x = radius1 * cos (q)
+ radius2 * cos (ratio * q)
y = radius1 * sin (q)
+ radius2 * sin (ratio * q)
This makes some pleasing shapes, so I thought I would try animating it.
The most obvious thing to do is to change the relative phase of the first
and second circles, but this just turns the whole thing round.
What's more interesting is to animate the phase of the x component (the cosine)
in the opposite direction to the y component (sine):
x = radius1 * cos (q)
+ radius2 * cos (ratio * q +
f)
y = radius1 * sin (q)
+ radius2 * sin (ratio * q -
f)
This makes the circle shrink to a line, then grow into a circle flowing the
opposite way, and then go through the same cycle again.
Combined with the first circle, this makes the sort of animations you can
see above.
Pleased with the results of this, in 2001 I made an applet to let people play with it, and that's where things stood till September 2004.
Then I read a gorgeously produced wee book called Harmonograph:
A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music.
Harmonograph provides an impressively clear and thorough introduction
to the basics of music theory, and ways of visualising music.
It does this in 50-odd pages, replete with beautiful illustrations of harmony
made by harmonographs,
kaleidophones,
Chladni plates
and the like.
A harmonograph is an instrument invented in the mid-nineteenth century, using
two or more pendulums to produce beautiful pictures.
The pictures are especially beautiful when the ratios of the frequencies of
the pendulums are close to whole numbers,
just as chords are especially beautiful when the ratios of the frequencies
notes making them up are close to whole numbers.
The pictures I was making with Trochor were almost the same pictures produced
by a rotary harmonograph,
except that the pendulums of a harmonograph steadily wind down as they draw,
and Trochor was restricted to whole numbers.
A kaleidophone, like a harmonograph, creates images of harmonics, but these
are made only fleetingly, in light.
It consists of a metal rod fixed in a stand, with a reflective bead on top,
which is struck and then stroked with a bow.
A beam of light reflected from the top of it casts patterns onto a screen,
rather like those of a rotary harmonograph, but more complex.
The biggest difference, judging by the illustrations I have seen, is that
it is not restricted to circular motion:
Free to vibrate in any direction, it produces patterns composed of interacting
linear waves and ellipses.
I have incorporated the idea of using ellipses, together with the damped
spiralling motion and non-integer ratios of the harmonograph, into Trochor.
With 0 eccentricity, we are back to the rotary harmonograph; with 1, we have
the linear harmonograph, producing Lissajous-type
figures.
The equations of this version are as follow:
x = (1-damping)n * (axis1a * cos
(q) + axis2a * cos (ratio
* q + f))
y =(1-damping)n * (axis1b * sin
(q) + axis1b * sin (ratio * q
- f))
(site-wide visits since
14/05/2005)