Sound and audio-visual media

Ryan Kamp

Sound you can see. This is a copper plate with black sand on it. Bow its edge and the sand runs to the lines where the plate stays still.

The same rule moves the sand on the Chladni plate in Splashery, my Gaussian splat playground. I'm a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, and audio-visual media is one of my interests.

Fig. 12 of 24

Mode
n 1 · m 3 · −
Pitch
654 Hz 10 × the lowest
Sand on a still line
0%

Fig. 12 · the centerpiece

Splashery

An interactive Gaussian splat playground that runs entirely in the browser. Pick a toy (a real captured object, or one generated from a seed), spin it, poke it, blow on it, splash paint on it, drop it, watch it fall apart and come back, make your own, and share it as a link, an embed, a GIF or a video.

Play Splashery Code Tinkerer's Manual

My part: I defined the project's vision and its toy categories, refined the interaction design through hands-on testing, and contributed mathematical recipes.

Four ways Splashery lets you see sound

One

A Chladni plate whose sand moves live

Every grain moves on every frame: it hops more where the plate swings more, and slides toward the plate's still lines. The swing is a live mix of the plate's modes, each as strong as the sound drives it. Change the note and the sand sets off for the new figure from where it lies. Hold a note and it settles into a crisp figure. Silence leaves it where it is. Turn on the microphone and the note you sing drives the plate: the mode nearest your note rings, as strongly as you sing.

A second toy does it in three dimensions: beads in a small cell of water gather on the still surfaces of a standing wave, pushed there by the acoustic radiation force.

w(x, y) = cos(nπx)·cos(mπy) ± cos(mπx)·cos(nπy)

On this page: the plate at the top follows that model, and a figure's pitch follows n² + m², so every note is a whole multiple of the lowest. With n and m up to 4 it can make exactly 24 figures on 14 pitches. Here is every one, lowest note first. Tap any to ring it.

The real one

This page draws its own plate. The one in Splashery is made of Gaussian splats, and it is one tap away: load it here, then tap the plate to hear its note and watch the sand find its figure.

Open the real plate on its own page

Two

A sound lab

A bench instrument with a scrolling spectrogram, the spectrum with its loudest frequency, and an oscilloscope. It shows the microphone once you tap "Use my microphone", and otherwise its own tone generator: sine, square, saw or noise, one tone or two that beat. Everything on its screens is measured from samples.

On this page: three screens, drawn in sand, that read this page's own sound. Loudest now: nothing yet.

Nothing of yours yet. Bow the plate or sing to it, then play it back.

Open the real sound lab on its own page

Spectrogram · time runs left, pitch runs up
Spectrum
Oscilloscope

Three

A song landscape

Open a song and Splashery cuts it into frames 40 milliseconds apart. Every shape it draws is a measured feature of the sound at that moment: its bands, its loudness, its spectral centroid (the brightness) and its pitch. The song plays as soon as it opens, and the picture fills in as the frames are measured.

On this page: a landscape of what you have played. One ridge per 40 millisecond frame, newest in front; a heavier line is a louder frame, the dot marks the measured pitch and the tick the centroid. The page keeps your last notes (which figure, how hard and when, never the sound), so Play it back draws them again.

Nothing of yours yet. Bow the plate or sing to it, then play it back.

Nothing played yet. Bow the plate, or play a phrase.

Four

A synthesized sound for every toy

Every toy has its own tap sound, synthesized from a library of about 80 voices: plucked strings, bells, xylophone bars, drums, creature voices, wind, engines, horns. The guitar strums a chord progression, Big Ben plays the Westminster quarters, and the music box plays a melody. Sound is off until you turn it on.

On this page: every project below has a figure of its own and the note that makes it. Tap a small plate to ring it.

Fig. 6 · 327 Hz

grooph

Visual loop graphs for coding-agent workflows. You draw who builds, who checks, where a person decides and when the work stops.

grooph checks that every loop names a stop, then compiles the graph into a prompt package for a separate coding-agent harness. It runs no agent and calls no model, and graphs stay on your device.

Open grooph Docs Code

  1. Build
  2. Check
  3. A person decides
  4. Stop

not yet: go round again

A loop that names its stop: two checks, one decision, then silence.

The other figures

Eight more

  1. Fig. 4 · 262 Hz

    reword_nerd

    A local-first browser workbench that turns a reviewed document, or a set of images, into a portable workbook of rewriting prompts. Everything stays reviewable in the browser, the download is a separate, explicit step, and the application contacts no model provider itself.

    Open Write-up Code

  2. Fig. 13 · 850 Hz

    resmon

    A local-first literature-monitoring desktop application. It runs scheduled searches across open-access scholarly sources, removes duplicates, and compiles reading reports, with optional summaries.

    Code

  3. Fig. 10 · 589 Hz

    Link Meteor

    A Chrome extension that collects links with their anchor text and URL in separate fields, for reviewing sources and exporting a research collection. No account, ads, telemetry or backend.

    Website Code

  4. Fig. 24 · 2,093 Hz

    English OpenList

    A free, open, continuously maintained list of valid English words, about 345,000 of them, with the provenance of every word (which sources attested it, and when), auditable correction records, and a browser explorer.

    Explore Code Dataset

  5. Fig. 17 · 1,112 Hz

    Ars Magna

    An anagram finder. Give it any text and it returns every way those exact letters can be re-partitioned into real English words, by a deterministic search.

    The plate's anagram: the same two waves and the same note, put together the other way.

    Try it Code

  6. Fig. 8 · 523 Hz

    aqrobat

    A local text and emoji QR lab: QR artwork built from letters, symbols or emoji.

    Make one Code

  7. Fig. 15 · 1,046 Hz

    Amordle

    A free word game: any word length from 2 to 35 letters, three difficulties, a daily puzzle, and ranked multiplayer with an Elo rating.

    One bar for every word length, 2 to 35. Tap or drag across them.

    Play Code Write-up

  8. Fig. 3 · 131 Hz

    The Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off in Perceptual Decision-Making

    My undergraduate research capstone, April 2025. It models evidence accumulation as a diffusion process and uses dynamic programming and value iteration to study decision boundaries in a simulated autonomous-vehicle obstacle-avoidance scenario.

    Code Video

The maker's mark

Ryan Kamp

Research interests: digital media, scientific visualization, computer graphics, software engineering, and information retrieval.

Graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio. MS in Computer Science, concentration in Artificial Intelligence, August 2025 to expected May 2027; thesis advisor Dr. Yizong Cheng. BA in Mathematics and BS in Neuroscience, University of Cincinnati, January 2020 to May 2025; capstone advisor Dr. Hyunjoong Kim.