Presentation: Kinetic art and pendulum wave machine

My presentation focused on Kinetic Art. This is defined as a form of art that depends on movement for its affect. The stimulus can be either internal or external it need not matter.  My interests are at the intersect of music and kinetic art. Movements propelled by music are extremely compelling.  A wave machine and pendulum movements offer prime demonstration of harmonic oscillation system. Pendulums in a wave machine when displaced from their equilibrium position, experience a restoring force, F, proportional to the displacement, x. The first “wave machine” was designed and constructed circa 1867 by Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist and philosopher. A wave machine is comprised of a series of pendulums with incremented frequencies. One way to think of the pendulum wave is as a series of points used to sample a wave of increasing frequency. The most popular and compelling demonstration is perhaps Harvard’s example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V87VXA6gPuE. Written descriptions do not do the phenomenon justice.  A wave machine demonstrates visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating and (seemingly) random motion. Harvard’s wave machine, takes sixty seconds to complete a full cycle (to come back to the center).  The longest pendulum executes fifty-one oscillations in this time, as the pendulums get shorter there is one additional oscillation. So, the last one completes 65 oscillations. Though the pendulum machine is a prime demonstration of physics the most important formula to understand how to coordinate the movement with music is the wave period formula T=2*pi*sqrt(L/g)*K(θ). There are many blogs that have gone very in depth in regards to this math, so I can redirect you there http://hippomath.blogspot.com/2011/06/making-your-own-pendulum-wave-machine.html.  For processing code that demonstrates a digital wave machine go here http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/28390.