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.
