Sandpiles and Synthesizers: Listening to the Discrete Laplacian
John A. Lind

Proceedings of Bridges 2019: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture
Pages 453–456
Short Papers

Abstract

There are many visual representations of the dynamical system determined by the action of the discrete Laplace operator of a graph. In this paper, I present an auditory representation which translates information about the evolving system into pitch, volume, and timbre data of notes played on a synthesizer. I have implemented the method on square lattices and recordings of the resulting pieces of music are available online.

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