Whirlpool (27th of September 2010)
Press play in the window above to start streaming from YouTube. It is a visualization of my composition "Whirlpool".
>> Maria Gaetana Agnesi and
>> Emmy Noether are often mentioned as a pride of female
part of humanity when it comes to science. Noether is surely much more important, I remember classical mechanics
and >> Noether's theorem about the connection
between the conservation laws and the symmetries of action, that was certainly powerfull. One of those moments when the
student of physics feels as if he is studying something profoundly deep. But, Maria Agnesi (1718-1799) is remembered
for being the first female university professor. For this post, something that got the name from Maria Agnesi is
more important, and that is versiera or the curve of Maria Agnesi. That curve is perhaps best known
under the name witch of Agnesi which is a consequence of several missunderstandings.
>> Versiera is a simple curve with a nice geometrical interpretation,
>> the article from Wikipedia is quite nice as an introduction.
Sometimes the constants in the function are arranged differently, so I first met the curve in a form
This functional dependence can nicely serve so to damp certain phenomena when the variable (x) becomes large. One can see that y vanishes when x goes to infinity. On the other hand, when x=0, then y=a. A range/speed of dampening is also proportional to a. Nice.
I used that dependence several times to smoothly turn on or off certain effects. And in this post I used it to construct a whirlpool. Namely, in the video I offer, the whirlpool is a curve of Maria Agnesi rotated around y-axis (and a bit scaled but that is of not much importance). Such a "whirlpool" is unnaturally precise (see the image below where the top view on the whirlpool is shown), and that is exactly the effect I was looking for my music.
Below is the side view to the whirlpool. There is nothing in this water except for precise mathematics, the "waves" and their "motion" are just motions of the texture.
And, in the end, a view from inside of the whirlpool towards the sky (image below).
The music was made in year 2000 or 2001, it is a bit difficult to be precise about that. It was also called Whirlpool originally. It it a rare composition that I made with a completely clear idea of the object, phenomenon that I wanted to describe in musical terms. I shamelessly think that it was a success.
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Last updated on 27th of September 2010.