Dancing dinosaurs and kool kats...

Only one post this week as I’m off to the Isle of Man tomorrow to give two maths popularization talks – the evergreen favourite on mathematics and card cheating and my new talk on Auto-Tune. Anyhow, recently I’ve been looking into harmonics, graphics, etc and came across an interesting research paper: http://zeus.mat.puc-rio.br/tomlew/pdfs/stereomh_tvc.pdf . There’s a video to go with it that you can see below. The idea is that you can take a 3D object and encode its shape in a way similar to that in which a sound can be encoded using the fundamental frequency and harmonics. By changing the “harmonics” for the 3D object you can get a new shape. Now what if you linked the harmonics in the shape to the harmonics in a tune? The shape will change in time to the music. And that’s what you can see in the video. Of course, why are these guys wasting time on writing papers when they could be writing a best-selling app for the...