Welcome to Scott Turner's blog.

Harmonographs create intriguing patterns of curves from the motion of pendulums. I always knew a little about them, from when my mathematician mother pointed out “Lissajous figures”. The name harmonograph recognizes that both these figures and musical harmony are closely tied to ratios.

This rested in the background until musical Steve expressed an interest in researching the relationships among the ratios, the graphs, the harmonies and the music. He needed some accurate harmonograph curves, and I thought it would be a fun subject for developing a computer program. So I put together a program that traces the path of the harmonograph. It was cool, but not what Steve needed.

Since then the major changes have been

• Record the path of the harmonograph permanently.
• Change the decay of the pendulums from viscous to friction.
• Make the user interface document-centric, saving configurations and graphs.
• Enable printing and exporting bitmaps.

And now it's released as harmonograph 1.0!

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