A Method of Timbre-Shape Synthesis Based On Summation of Spherical Curves

It is well-known that there is a rich correspondence between sound and visual curves, perhaps most widely explored through direct input of sound into an oscilloscope. However, there have been relatively few proposals on how to translate sound into three-dimensional curves. We present a novel method for simultaneous production of sonic tones and graphical curves based on additive synthesis of spherical curves. The spherical curves are generated from a sequence of elemental 3D rotations, similar to a Euler rotation. We show that this method can produce many important two- and three-dimensional curves directly from sine waves and thus provide a basic language for exploring timbre-shape relationships.