Comments on: Whitney music box

By: theMonkey

theMonkey — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:47:21 +0000

Thanks for stopping by, Jim.

It’s an interesting challenge… I’ll have to chew on it for awhile. The rotation of spiral galaxies isn’t as simple as it seems… rotation curves for spirals are “flat” when graphed (which is one of the biggest areas of research in astrophysics for the past few decades).

Here’s a Wiki entry that describes the issue.

Do the dots on the Whitney visualizer rotate in a similarly “flat” manner?

By: Jim Bumgardner

Jim Bumgardner — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:09:09 +0000

Wow, this was a particularly nice & pithy description of what is going on. Given some astronomical data, I would *love* to turn it into music,
whitney style. One idea that occurs to me would be to take a database of star positions, and rotate them about the galactic center, and use it to trigger large numbers of notes. Alternately, I suppose I could use high-resolution galaxy photos in much the same way…

- Jim Bumgardner (Whitney Music Box guy)