I Turn Particle Simulations Into Digital Art Using A Synthesizer

Some time ago, I got curious to see what it would look like if I did a computer program that simulated the interaction between several thousand particles. I came up with some innovative forces based on the distance and the relative velocities between every pair of particles. By drawing a line from the current point to the next, I was able to see the motion.

Even at this early stage, the images that got created (in realtime) was very impressive and gave birth to many new ideas. What if I added blur, fading effects, several concurrently interacting forces, different color schemes and mouse interaction? I just couldn’t stop coding. After a while I ported everything to the graphics processor so I was able to handle up to 10 million particles at the same time on my retina 13 laptop.

Having around 100 variables to tweak, I quickly couldn’t stand the keyboard so a bought a midi synthesizer (Arturia Minilab) and programmed it to control every parameter (it is also used for storing and recalling old settings).

The only randomness in the program is the initial position of the particles, which is the same from the beginning anyway, the thing that makes the images different is the different settings of the parameters and pure chaos. With that said and the fact that I record all the events coming from the synthesizer, I can recreate every image to make it in a different resolution – my currently biggest generated picture is 153 megapixels.

I Turn Particle Simulations Into Digital Art Using A Synthesizer

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Manne Tallmarken (Post author) 5 years ago

For more recent images from this project visit https://www.instagram.com/systeera

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Emin Durak 7 years ago

This is fantastic. Could you explain more the details of your implementation? I also live in Stockholm by the way. Would you be open to experiment this to integrate it into a live sound/music performance? :)