Field Recordings: GPU Particle System Driven by Audio

Studio R&D, real-time graphics. The transect, its stations and their grid are invented and labelled as invented. The twelve recordings and every measurement are real files.

In 1857 Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph, which wrote sound onto paper and could not play it back. He expected the lines to be read. The archive takes him at his word, so every shape had to come from the sound itself, with nothing drawn by hand.

Twelve recordings were synthesised and kept as files, then measured in Python with NumPy and SciPy short-time Fourier transforms. Every figure on every page is drawn from those measurements.

A GPGPU particle system written in WebGL2 for the piece rather than imported: float render targets, ping-pong state and instanced line drawing.

Particles ride the curl of a 3D noise field. Curl noise is divergence-free, so particles swirl and never pile into a point, and the flow runs along the sound's contours, so each particle traces the shape of the recording.

One population of particles holds every page; each page is a target the field reforms into.

Turning a page sends the whole field into its next form: a waveform, a spectrogram opened out, a trace. Type uses a variable face set on its weight and width axes, so headings and readings share one family.

Twelve plates, each a figure only its recording makes.

Every figure measured from committed audio files.

Measured on the published build (Chromium 141, Lighthouse 12.8 desktop preset, October 2026):

0 third-party requests. Engine, analysis data and type ship in one 2.5 MB file.

0 JavaScript errors with WebGL disabled or reduced motion on; the page falls back and keeps all of its text.

Lighthouse 100 for best practices and SEO.

The six-page PDF edition embeds every font it uses.

Live build: https://studio-helpers.com/work/field-recordings/

Brief the studio: studio-helpers.com · WhatsApp +92 346 6616118 · Sulmancheema82@gmail.com