ShapeSound

Geometry and sound are the same subject wearing different clothes — a wave is a shape, a shape has a frequency — but they get taught in different rooms, usually years apart.

ShapeSound is a small attempt to put them in the same room.

Four activities that build on each other: construct a shape, put it in motion, watch the motion become a wave, then shape a note from the wave. Each step reuses what the last one produced, so the connection is something you do rather than something you're told.

Underneath is a Web Audio engine synthesising directly from the geometry on screen, so changing a shape changes the sound in real time. No samples — the sound is the math, which is the only version of this that makes the point.

I built the four activities as a sequence with a fixed order, assuming the concepts had to stack. Watching someone use it, the interesting moments came from jumping backwards — hearing a note, then going back to change the shape that made it. The causality is more legible in reverse than forwards, and the linear journey works against that.

An experiment, and likely to stay one. But the audio engine is the part I keep wanting to pull out and reuse somewhere else.