Noise Etude (2001)
131 seconds, 24 frames a second, every pixel a formula. Written as a QTS script in February 2001 and rendered then over many hours; rendered again for this page by the same code, now compiled from C++ to WebAssembly and native, in about three minutes. Open noiseetude.can in the editor to scrub through it or render it yourself.
What this is
Pixel Magic began in 1995 as a Photoshop filter and then a Macintosh program: a dialog with a
formula for the red, green and blue of each pixel in terms of x, y, the polar coordinates
a and d, and t, time, so it could write QuickTime movies as well as stills.
It was ported to Windows in 1998–2000, where it gained a preset browser and a flex/bison parser for the language.
QTS ("QuickTime Synthesizer", 2001–2003) was its last form: the same expression language, but the picture is described by a script of nested sequences, each with a start time and duration, which can sample one another, zoom, tile, layer with Photoshop-style blend modes, and sample images. It is the program that made Noise Etude.
This site is the QTS renderer ported from its C++ source to run in the browser. The expression compiler, the noise, fractal and easing functions, the sequence timing and the renderer are the originals' logic, kept faithful enough that the sample scripts from 2001 render as they did (a few bugs of the day included, where they show). The math library is compiled in, so a frame renders the same bits on every machine. Rendering runs in Web Workers on all your cores; MP4s are encoded in the browser with WebCodecs.
The same code builds a native command-line renderer (qts) that writes PNG frames or pipes raw
video to ffmpeg; that is what rendered the movie above.
Related
Syd is the audio counterpart from the same years: a software synthesizer with the same expression language, also running in the browser.
Jim Bumgardner — krazydad.com/about