Overview
A fountain is an instrument that happens to be plumbing. This is the part of the Computational Acoustic Architecture work that asks: if you want a fountain to sound like a particular color of noise -; a soft pink hush, a deep brown rumble -; what shape, what materials, what flow rate gets you there? The designer takes a target spectrum and solves backwards into fountain geometry, dimensions, materials, and a 3D model.
Background
This grew out of the colored-noise research: once you believe specific spectra do specific things to people, you want to put those spectra into physical, public spaces -; not a speaker playing a recording, but water genuinely producing the sound. Fountains were the obvious first surface, because nearly every acoustic mechanism you'd want is already present: droplet impacts, basin resonance, turbulence, material absorption.
How It Works
The model assembles a fountain's spectrum from physical sub-models and then optimizes the design parameters to match a target spectral slope. The pieces:
- Droplet impact -; impact frequency from drop size and fall height; drop-size distribution scales with flow rate.
- Basin resonance -; circular basins use Bessel-zero modes; rectangular basins use the standard 2D modal series.
- Helmholtz resonance -; sphere-array fountains tuned as resonators (kept below), with an end-correction term.
- Material absorption -; concrete, stone, metal, ceramic, glass, wood, each shaping the spectrum by its frequency-dependent α(f).
The Helmholtz resonance of a sphere-array element is the same relation the index page uses as its example formula -; here it's load-bearing:
Noise color is characterized by spectral slope -; white is flat, pink falls at
−3 dB/octave, brown at −6, blue and violet rise -; and the optimizer
scores a candidate fountain by how close its measured slope sits to the target. Eight
fountain archetypes are modeled, from sphere_array and
classic_tiered to rain_curtain, musical_steps
(a pentatonic series), and vortex. Finished designs export to STL, scaled
down for 3D printing.
Current Status
Archived. The modeling, optimization, and STL export all work; it lives as part of the broader CAA project rather than a standalone tool.
- Eight fountain types with spectrum models and optimization.
- Six materials with frequency-dependent absorption.
- STL export for printable scale models.