Milwaukee's Flag Sounds Insane
Axiom Talks
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Milwaukee's Flag Sounds Insane
9 470 просмотров · 17 часов назад
Axiom Talks
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9 470 просмотров · 17 часов назад
Thirty US city flags, traced from the real artwork by a pen whose height becomes its pitch — ranked from the least pitch movement to the most.
The quietest is Washington DC: eight pieces, three stars and two bars, no seal and no writing. The loudest is Milwaukee: 193 pieces carrying a seal, a skyline, a gear, a ship, a church, a wheat sheaf and its own name. Milwaukee moves the pen 14.8 times as far as Washington does, and it is the loudest flag this channel has ever traced — louder than New Hampshire, louder than Turkmenistan.
Then the ranking contradicts itself in the middle. Cleveland's seal is 43 traced pieces. Topeka's flag is 6. They land 0.1% apart — the same note. Loudness is how far the pen climbs and falls, not how many pieces it draws.
The ranking is measured, not chosen: total pitch travel in semitones per second, summed within each piece (a pen lift is silence), computed from the traced outline before a single frame is drawn. The number is on screen for every city.
Every flag is traced from its public-domain rendering on Wikimedia Commons, not redrawn from shapes. Cities whose only public-domain basis was United States-specific were left out rather than approximated. The sound is synthesised from the pen's height and the stereo position from the pen's x. Nothing is sampled.
Which city should I trace next?