Last April, a friend who knows me too well told me about this new KickStarter for a Cycloid Drawing Machine. I looked at this intriguing adult spyrograph with great wonder, but then moved onto other things. But the machine continued to pique my interest, and every few days I would look at it again, trying […]

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I have a major obsession with circles, wheels and other round objects. Much of my experimental music and art is circular or spiral in form. I collect kaleidoscopes, pictures of crop circles. The list goes on. If I had to spend the rest of my life […]

Hey, remember that music box kit I was playing with a few months ago? Vi Hart had the brilliant idea of twisting the paper into a Möbius strip! This effectively doubles the length of the music and presents an interesting compositional challenge. Check out the video!

The music box disc I’m getting prepared, mentioned in the previous post, looks something like this. Here’s a simulation of what it would sound like, played on an antique Stella music box, assuming the box’s spring-wound mechanism has the strength to play the first chord, in which every tine sounds at the same time. It […]

If you read this blog regularly, you know that a lot of the things I make involve circles. My fascination with circles and radial symmetry has extended to kaleidoscopes, fibonacci spirals, music, card tricks, spinning wheels of lunch, and so on. You may also know that I am prone to develop short term obsessions, which […]

Here’s my latest Quartz Composer screensaver for the Mac. This combines the fibonacci spiral seen in a lot of my graphic images with the harmonic motions from my Whitney Music Box. The motion in this screensaver is actually quite simple — if you look at each disc, you’ll see that it is just sitting in […]

Wheel Music is another music visualization, using similar techniques to those I used in my Whitney Music Box. Each dot in the animation represents an individual note you are hearing. The notes are slowly traveling around in a circle. Each square represents a different tone cluster, or chord. Colors represent note values, and the radius […]

I’m currently working on a series of mosaics using landscape and animal photos. Here’s a sample. UPDATE: I received a letter about this image. Here it is. I love the work that you do, and I have a question about what an algorithm is. Is it math that you can Javascript, taken from an abstraction […]

I’ve been examining the visual patterns produced by the Whitney Music Box (see previous post). If you watch the animation for any length of time, you’ll notice that the dots form spoked or starfish-like patterns periodically. These patterns often cause chords to be played by the music box. I was curious to understand the sequence […]