Snake Charmer is an applet closely based on Paul Friedlander’s light sculptures, which use hanging ropes spun at varying speeds, combined with ‘Chromastrobic’ lights’ (changing colour very quickly), to produce stunning visual effects. I recommend seeing the full-sized, physical ones if you ever get the chance, but I think there’s a lot of fun to be had with this interactive simulation, too.
Resonata Squared is based on a stack of chains, each transmitting waves at a different speed, but all driven by the same driving frequency.
The original Resonata is considerably more sophisticated in various ways, but really almost completely different.
Having finally looked up how to produce big images in processing, I’ve been having great fun digging up code I originally wrote more than a decade ago in POCO (the Autodesk Animator Pro variant of C), translating it into Processing and whipping up stills which are potentially big enough to print at about two feet across (I’m settling for 2400×2400 for now – nothing seriously vast). Here’s a sampling that you can view at 1024×1024, or here’s a full-size version of the first…
I might make t-shirts of some of these (etc.) available in my Cafepress Trigonometry shop (already selling some related designs), although I’ve never really made enough sales there to justify the effort.
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