VORTEX II

Every grain you see is assigned to one of the three roots and orbits an elliptical ring at a rate set by that root’s spin control. Ring radius and particle size are then scaled by the live RMS level read from the browser’s analyser node, so the field genuinely breathes with the sound rather than running on a timer. Turn a root off and its ribbon thins and dims instead of vanishing.

The spokes radiating from the centre count the root: root 3 draws three, root 6 draws six, root 9 draws nine, each rotating with its own ring. The spoke count tells you at a glance what is playing. Particle count drops automatically on narrow screens to hold the frame rate.

Vortex I is the geometric sibling of this page — discrete orbs and star-polygon chords instead of a continuous field. Same audio engine, same presets, same timers. Pick whichever you find easier to sit with.

Sound is a pressure wave. Below roughly 100 Hz you stop hearing it purely as pitch and start feeling it — the chest, the sternum, the surface you’re sitting on. That’s ordinary mechanical coupling: dense media transmit low-frequency vibration more efficiently than air does, which is why a subwoofer moves furniture and a tweeter doesn’t.

Tesla worked this territory from the mechanical side. His 1898 electro-mechanical oscillator experiments on Houston Street are the source of the famous shook-the-building story — a story with no contemporary corroboration, told mainly by Tesla himself decades later and by his biographer. What is solidly documented is the 1899 Colorado Springs season: dated notebooks logging stationary-wave passages in the ground and atmosphere, published in full in 1978. The Schumann resonance near 7.83 Hz — Earth’s electromagnetic cavity mode, calculated by Winfried Schumann in 1952 — sits in the same band TeslaQuake logs as part of its Tesla nodal-resonance study. Linking Tesla’s 1899 observations to it is a reading offered by later scholars, not a claim Tesla made.

The binaural control creates a small frequency offset between your left and right ears; the brain perceives a beat at the difference. It’s a real and well-documented perceptual effect. What that beat does beyond being audible is still debated in the literature, and this page doesn’t claim an answer. Use it because the field is pleasant to sit inside.