After some wrangling with Processing I’ve created a program that writes optical tonewheels in a variety of shapes.  However, I wanted to also be able to include recorded waveforms like optical film sound except in a circle.  The resolution needs to be high and the image scaleable, so distorting a screengrab of a waveform does not work.

Using a little patch I wrote in Max/MSP, I created a list of the average amplitude of a 10-second audio sample.  The result was 10,000 values which were translated into the image above.

Probably not perfect, but at it at least looks really great.

Download the source code (in progress) here.