A Pendulum With Growing Amplitude

When you increase the amplitude of a realistic pendulum, its period grows (frequency decreases) and the oscillation are no longer sinusoidal. Here we see typical amplitude versus time plots for increasing amplitudes.

If we want to describe how this systems reacts when you gradually increase its amplitude we could make dozens of plots and create an animation (gif-movie 80k) or a soundfile (80k) of this amplitude versus time.
The two processes of creating a soundfile or an animation are pretty similar. For the animation we produced a large number of images and glued them together into a movie. For the soundfile we essentially created one soundfile for every amplitude setting and glued them together.

If we would increase the energy of the pendulum any further by moving it up to the top and giving it an additional push, it would start to rotate. This is not an oscillation anymore and so our simple method to create soundfiles will fail and we have to use a different approach to represent this situation using sound.

Back to the sound page.