While it may not be obvious, this is intended to be a simulation of a
musical instrument, even if one more useful in composition than in
performance. The numbers calculated are intended to be the frequencies of
musical tones.
I origianlly wrote this during the summer of 2001, and have made very few
changes since then. As such it represents an early stage in my gradual
(and still incomplete) assimilation of a musical theory called Just
Intonation. In particular I had still not learned about harmonic series
when writing this page. Rather than try to explain Just Intonation, let me
simply direct you to the website of
The Just Intonation Network.
The inclusion of a stack for base frequencies is my own addition, and
not part of any current musical tradition, so far as I am aware. The
point of it being there is to support the process of diverging from and
then returning to a theme.
Since writing this page I've spent many hours learning C, Objective-C,
the basics of Cocoa, and at least an outline view of CoreAudio, with the
intention of implementing something like what you see here on Mac OS X,
complete with sound. After that, who knows...
John T. Payne
a.k.a. satyr@well.com