Processing (My first sketch!)

In the lesson plan for Creative Music Computing 2b there is mention of a program called Processing. I decided to download this program and give it a try.

The website http://processing.org/ describes it as such: ‘Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions.’

For my first attempt I realise that the code is rather messy and there must be many ways in which I can improve it (I have been trying to teach myself from tutorials and forums). My idea was based on a very nice screensaver that I stumbled across called ‘Fractal Clock’ ( free to download from http://www.dqd.com/~mayoff/programs/FractalClock/). I wanted to produce similar visuals but also allow for dots to be drawn on screen which , whenever hit/crossed by a line would play a tone. However once I started coding I came up against many problems, which I am still trying to solve. So I decided to play around with the code that I had already written, and managed to produce a rather nice visual animation. By reducing the transparancy of the lines and not redrawing the background on each frame the animation creates a rather pleasing set of sweeps and arcs. I added code to change the colour of the lines drawn by clicking and holding either the left or right mouse button. I also added code so that a keyboard keypress would clear the image and allow the animation to continue on a clear background.
The animation/interaction can be seen here – http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=20177
and the source code is also available.