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Show HN: Strange Attractors

(blog.shashanktomar.com)
756 points shashanktomar | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.353s | source

I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js.

Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun.

My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to 3D, not sure if it’s mathematically correct, but it’s the coolest by far. I have left all the params configurable, so give it a try. I called it Simone (Maybe).

If you like math-art experiments, check it out. Would love feedback, especially from folks who know more about the math side.

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Xophmeister ◴[] No.45778698[source]
Neat :) When I was a teenager, some 25+ years ago, I wrote a chaotic attractor visualiser like this — but only in 2D — and it occurred to me, “What if instead of visualising it, I rendered it to audio?” I don’t remember the details: I think frequency was correlated with polar angle and amplitude to magnitude. It forced me to learn how to write WAV format — which was my first introduction to endianness — but the result wasn’t completely inaudible! A bit like the sound effects for computers in old sci-fi movies; random(ish) but not discordant beeps and boops!
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1. gausswho ◴[] No.45779063[source]
Along these lines there are at least two modules that I know of in Eurorack focused on strange attractors, and they're both a LOT of fun adding this kind of unpredictable-but-cyclical movement to your sounds:

- Hypster by Nonlinear Circuits (https://modulargrid.net/e/nonlinearcircuits-ian-fritz-s-hyps...)

- Orbit 3 by Joranalogue (https://modulargrid.net/e/joranalogue-audio-design-orbit-3)