pierrec

The pattern in OP's project can be called phyllotaxis. This is supported by the link you provide which gives even looser examples that are still described as "exhibiting phyllotaxis". A lot of words refer to nature if you look into semantics, not surprising if you consider the amount of beautiful and useful patterns it gives us.

For metallophones used in Gamelan music, I don't think the key difference is emphasis on higher vs. lower overtones. Rather, their overtones don't follow the harmonic series but are still well-defined. Their tuning goes along with that, and it works given that particular non-harmonic timbre, but wouldn't work with western classical instruments, which tend to approximate the harmonic series in their overtones. In all cases the lower overtones remain the most audible and the most important ones for tuning and finding consonance.

Interesting but I'm trying to imagine, what kind of features are we talking about here, leaves on the ground? Bumps on a terrain heightmap? Also do you mean one feature is placed in the center of each voronoi cell?

PS everything you've posted on HN seems "dead" until now, but I think your project TideGlass looks cool. A valid if niche way of turning realtime 3D art into a complete product, and the scenes look really well done. Would try it if I used MacOS.

Yup, the old brap n' snap. Everyone who swims around whales knows and fears this.

Oddly enough, I've seen a similar injury on a dolphin before. Well, the head was missing, but the cutoff point could be described as "corkscrew". None of us had a good idea of the cause, but this hints it may have been predation or scavenging.

Fair point, my (and many people's) point of view is very virtual instrument centric. I'd still say that better impulses would improve the tool for the potential luthier application.

In this area of research, there's this classic trap that many fall into (including myself, many times). You focus on modeling things like the vibrating string, the resonant body, etc. to perfection. But it still sounds, uh, not great, because the more important and difficult part is modeling detailed control and the human/instrument interface. Air fluctuations around the violin sound like a fun experiment, but I don't think you'll get much additional realism from that, compared to a simple/classical impulse response model.

Even in this case, they're choosing the easy path (plucked, pizzicato), but the human/instrument interface is still audibly oversimplified while the resonant body has an unnecessary amount of "realism". The sound of pizzicato has a distinct character because the player's finger/skin slides a bit on the string as they're plucking, among other factors, which sounds like it's missing here. This can be tricky to implement because it's not necessarily a one-way impulse. The string is already vibrating and affects the finger, hence "interface".

This applies 10x more with bowed strings.

The music all by itself is not particularly enjoyable here. What's great is the concept, execution, and the way data from an unlikely source is directly audible in the music. What defines art will always be fuzzy, but this particular work is a good example of art I can appreciate: presenting known things in an unusual way, playing with perception to create new connections between remote concepts, and sometimes providing a stepping stone to, as you say, enlightenment.