Creating interactive acoustics animations using Mathematica's Computable Document Format

Abstract

The computational and graphical prowess of Mathematica has long made it a powerful educational tool for creating effective animations of acoustic and vibration phenomena [Russell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 2197 (1999) and Sparrow and Russell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 103, 2987 (1998)]. Once an animation has been created within Mathematica it is relatively easy to convert the animation to an animated GIF file for display on a website [Russell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 114, 2308 (2003)]. However, such animations, while effective at conveying or illustrating complicated acoustic phenomena, are “static” in the sense that they are not interactive and a person viewing the animation cannot change parameters. Recently, Wolfram Research implemented a new Computable Document Format that allows interactive plots and animations to be inserted into webpages and electronic documents. A free CDF player from Wolfram allows viewers to interact with plots and animations by moving sliders to change values of parameters. This talk will demonstrate the process of creating a CDF animation for embedding in a webpage. Other, more complex, demonstrations will also be showcased do illustrate the potential capabilities of CDF as an educational tool.