SPHERE

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What you are looking at

A sphere of a quarter-million particles suspended in a three-dimensional standing wave. The wave is born at the centre and radiates outward; where it cancels itself out — the nodal surfaces — particles come to rest and the structure appears. It is Chladni's vibrating plate, wrapped into a volume, and driven by whatever you feed it.

Feeding it

• Load — any audio file. Or drop one anywhere on the page.
• Demo — a generative track that plays instantly, no file needed.
• Mic — the room, a live instrument, whatever it can hear.
• Tone — a clean sine. Sweep the frequency slowly to walk through the harmonic series one mode at a time. This is the best way to understand the instrument.

How the music maps

• Pitch chooses the spherical harmonic — the angular shape, the number of lobes.
• Brightness of the sound sets the radial wavenumber — how many concentric shells fit inside the sphere.
• Bass swells the whole volume and drives the shell.
• Transients fire a pressure pulse outward from the core.
• Loudness raises agitation, so quiet passages crystallise and loud ones dissolve.

Controls worth knowing

• Order — how hard particles are pulled onto the nodal surfaces. High is crisp and sculptural, low is a nebula.
• Agitation — thermal noise fighting the order. The tension between these two is the whole picture.
• Shells — scales the radial wavenumber. Low gives a few fat shells, high gives dense onion layers.
• Auto-choreograph — lets the music also move the camera and nudge the look. Turn it off to hold a shot.

Keys

Drag to orbit · scroll to zoom · it drifts on its own when you let go.