Dawn - sound wave poster

SERIES F // Ridges

Dawn

€39

Peaks rise from a low plain as the first light falls on the horizon.

Colour
Format
Size

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About the piece

Where it all began. Dozens of waveforms stacked one behind another, like a landscape captured by a radio telescope at 3 a.m. Perlin noise explained

Drawn in code from seed
00005
Series
Ridges
Variant
Horizon
Palette
Ember
Sizing

30 × 40 cm (12 × 16 in) or 45 × 60 cm (18 × 24 in), with a white border around the picture. Framed prints come in a black or natural wood frame (12 mm wide) with plexiglass, ready to hang.

Print & materials

Fine art matte paper (200 gsm) at 300 DPI, made to order. Every size is rendered natively - lines stay razor-sharp even at the largest size.

Shipping & payment

Free shipping worldwide. Every print is made to order within a few business days and shipped worldwide, packed to arrive flawless. You see the delivery estimate for your country when you order.

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Fine art paper

200 gsm enhanced matte

Printed on thick uncoated art paper at 300 DPI. Rich colour, razor-sharp lines, no glare.

Real wood frames

Black or natural wood

Wooden frame, 22 mm deep, with plexiglass that is lighter and safer than glass. Arrives ready to hang.

Made to order

Free shipping worldwide

Each print is made for you when you order and packed to arrive flawless, wherever you are.

The story

Thirty-eight lines, the fewest in the series, with the peaks gathered in the middle. Each line sits a little higher than the last, like hills separating from the plain at first light.

MATHEMATICS

The maths behind the picture

Every piece is computed, not drawn. These are the real equations and numbers from the program that made this exact piece.

Read the guide: Perlin noise explained →
Equations
yᵢ(t) = bᵢ − A·env(t)·eᵢ·(1.56·n₁(t)² + 0.45·|sin(2π·f·t + φᵢ)|³·n₂(t))env(t) = Σₖ aₖ·e^(−((t − cₖ)/wₖ)²) · sin(πt)^0.6
Parameters
Lines
38
Carrier frequency
29.64
Envelopes
0.584±0.052 · 0.578±0.058
Perlin noise
4 octaves · falloff 0.5
Measured while drawing
Samples
22,838
Focus line
16
What these numbers mean

Nature is neither perfectly smooth nor completely random: clouds, mountains and waves are somewhere in between. In 1983 Ken Perlin invented a noise that looks like nature: a smooth function that gives random but gentle changes. The program adds four layers (octaves) of this noise, each half as strong and twice as fine as the last. That is what gives the lines life, so they don't look like they were drawn with a ruler.

HISTORY

Where this idea comes from

  1. 1809

    Carl Friedrich Gauss publishes the bell-shaped distribution. Every mountain in these pictures is one Gaussian envelope.

  2. 1967

    Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the first pulsar. Pulsar signals were plotted exactly like this, as stacked lines, pulse after pulse.

  3. 1983

    Ken Perlin invents the noise that gives these lines their natural irregularity.

Perlin noise

  1. 1982

    Ken Perlin works on the effects for the film Tron and is frustrated that computer images look too "machine-like".

  2. 1983

    Perlin invents his noise and publishes it in 1985 at SIGGRAPH, in the paper "An Image Synthesizer".

  3. 1997

    Perlin receives an Academy Award for Technical Achievement: his noise becomes the basis of smoke, fire and cloud textures in film.

  4. 2001

    Perlin publishes an improved version and "simplex" noise. Today games, films and programmer art all over the world use it.

In nature

Waveforms stacked one behind another read like ridges of hills in fog, each row a little further away.