Harmonograph
Published on 16 April 2008
The Harmonograph was a 19th century curiosity for visualising the mathematics of music.
A common form of the device was to have two pendulums that swing at right angles to each other. From the top of each pendulum an arm that is attached to a pen. By changing the relative swinging frequency of the pendulums the pen will trace out some interesting shapes. An additional variation is to also attach the paper platform to the top of a third pendulum and set this spinning.
The equations that describe the behaviour and a detailed explanation of the physical devices are detailed by Paul Bourke. There is also a superbly illustrated book by Wooden Books dedicated to Harmonographs.
Explore the Harmonograph online or download AS3 source code.
Last updated: 5 October 2008
2 Comments
Links & further reading
- Interactive Harmonograph
- Harmonograph Gallery
- Download AS3 source code
- Harmonograph: A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music
Part of the excellent Wooden Books series.
- Harmonograph wikipedia entry
Related posts
- Fractals and generative art resources
- An overview with links of my talk at the Apple Store in Glasgow.
- Butterfly curves
- Continuing the theme of circular patterns this experiment explores a formula that can create butterfly like curves.
- Guilloché Patterns
- Start designing your own bank notes with this spirograph like pattern generator.
- Gumowski-Mira Patterns
- An interactive investigation of the marine looking patterns created by the Gumowski-Mira transformation.
- More blog posts
Had put a link on your harmonograph applet on Wikipedia's article.. ^^
Hello! The Harmonograph is lovely! But, I downloaded the source code since I would love to put it in a section of my site, and I see it has MacOS files.. Will it work if installed through WinXP? Also, how exactly is it installed/uploaded? And finally, I would like to ask for permission, after I understand its file structure, to translate it in Japanese.