My Whitney Music Box made the front page of Reddit today, and is being picked up by a few other sites. Here are some blog entries I wrote about it, back when I was working on it: Visual Harmony A φ Fractal Dan Piker’s Whitney Variations HensTooth Discs Whitney Music Box simulation Also check out […]

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 […]

Hey kids, remember that 2007 GEL conference talk I posted on YouTube a few months back? Well, GEL impressario Mark Hurst has posted my talk, along with a collection of other equally (if not more) fascinating GEL talks (each precisely 20 minutes long), for your amusement and enlightenment. Hopefully, these videos will inspire you to […]

A new product, Reaktor Animated Circuits from Native Instruments has an interesting sequencer called Spiral (shown above) which was inspired by my Whitney Music Box. I’ve been playing with a version that Native Instruments sent me, and it’s pretty cool! If you’re interested in getting Animated Circuits, you’ll also need the latest version of Reaktor […]

In a recent comment here on KrazyDad, Daniel Piker shared some flash variations he made recently of the John Whitney-inspired “Incremental Drift” animations used in my Whitney Music Box. These are all visual eye candy, without music, but they demonstrate some great flash animation techniques! One with semicircles One very colourful one – The complementary […]

This is my attempt to make some eye candy roughly in the style of James Whitney’s wonderful 1966 movie, Lapis, which can occasionally be spotted on Youtube. If you’re interested in making stuff like this, just remember, it all starts with π. If you’re a mathophobe, and even the barest mention of π sends you […]

I put up a new Whitney Music Box variation for the holiday. Happy Halloween!

This weekend, after adding stereo support to my software synthesizer, JSyd, I added three new stereo variations to the Whitney Music Box. These are fun to watch and listen to with headphones. Variation 14 Variation 15 Variation 16

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 […]