Drifting Frequencies

We cannot exist apart from ourselves as individuals, yet we are never truly alone. Every day we meet, collide and resonate with others, and our presence becomes a frequency that shapes one another. Our surroundings keep reshaping these relationships and differences, giving each life its own colour. Drifting Frequencies tries to capture these subtle resonances and currents, and the shifting emotional waves between people.

The piece began as an entry to a campus NFT open call themed “resonance”, and was selected.

I have long wondered how relationships between people can be described and understood. Since university I have watched the small currents between people: some insist they are not easily influenced, yet much has already shifted beneath the surface.

When I heard the word resonance, I pictured ripples on water: a still surface disturbed, the ripples spreading, overlapping, interfering and shaping one another, like the quiet but deep influence people have on each other.

The work is built in p5.js. Early on I came across Chladni patterns, the geometric figures that sound vibrations create, and they opened another way of imagining resonance.

To get closer to the idea of resonating ripples, I used ChatGPT to help build the ripple-generation logic, then tuned the parameters and interaction many times so the motion reads as waves influencing and spreading through each other.