Phyllotactic FFT Spirals

Modifying phyllotactic patterns using fft of microphone input.

Note: to use the mic, the browser requires a user interaction – Click the rotating circle to begin!

Using the microphone - learning to love the FFT

The FFT (see 3b1b - But what is the Fourier Transform? ) converts a signal from the time domain to the frequency domain…

What?

Time domain means the value the microphone is receiving at each point in time.

As a human I think more of pitch or frequency, and so we need to convert the fluctuation the microphone records back into a pitch.

p5.FFT has two parameters we can play with:

• smoothing - impacts how fast the FFT responds to changes
• size - the number of frequency bins (pitches) to analyze