BOUND WAVEFORMS

A studio for flowing, generative surface relief. Compose a 3-D panel from layered pattern operators, shape it with your touch, drive it with sound, and freeze it as a mesh or heightmap for fabrication.

QUICK START

The panel is locked top-down and fills the frame. In Perturb mode, drag on it to place a calm zone — the surface smooths and flattens there and the ridges ease away, growing denser elsewhere (the quiet area you'd want near a cabinet handle). Open ▸ Field to build the surface, or tap reset to reference to return to the default panel.

MODES

• Perturb — drag to move the calm/flatten zone.
• Ripple — tap to send live, interfering ripples across the surface.
• Attractor — click to drop pull/push points (up to 8).

THE FIELD — operators

• BOUND · dunes — flowing parallel ridges (the default). Domain-warped waves: Density (spacing), Flow + Swirl (how they meander), Angle, Amplitude. The touch is shaped by Push away, Flatten, and Touch size.
• MODAL · chladni — standing-wave figures on a square plate (an 8×8 mode grid). With audio, the spectrum drives the modes.
• RIPPLE · live — a real wave simulation.
• NOISE · fBm — organic terrain. GRATING · moiré — crossed interference fringes. RINGS — concentric waves. ATTRACTORS — click-placed points.
• GLOBAL — Relief (height), Thickness (solid slab), Edge frame (flat border; relief tapers up toward the center), Dust (settling powder, off by default), Reactivity (audio sensitivity).

SOUND

Load a ♪ Track or open the Mic. Onsets send ripples; loudness modulates the field. With the Modal operator on, 64 frequency bands drive a 64-zone standing-wave projection.

DESIGN & FABRICATION

The relief is smooth and rounded with gentle slopes — drawable for vacuum forming, millable for CNC, castable for panels. The touch builds a density gradient (calm near a feature, dense away from it), the way attractor-based parametric façades vary a pattern by distance to a point. Freeze a state with ⤓ OBJ (a mesh) or ⤓ PNG (a grayscale displacement / height map).

LINEAGE & REFERENCES

• Chladni figures — Ernst Chladni (1787) bowed sand-dusted metal plates; the sand fled the moving antinodes and settled on the still nodal lines, drawing the plate's modes. The Modal operator and the optional settling Dust echo this.
• The field and grain behavior draw on cymatics, reaction-diffusion, and curl-noise advection. A companion to the author's own resonance and sand works, Murmur and In Dust.
• Attractor-driven density follows parametric-façade practice: Attractors in Architecture · Algorithmic Patterns for Façade Design (2018) · Generative Algorithms for Façade Design.