Steve Reich made a lot of music based on the phasing in and out of imperfect time sources in the 1970s. If you're interested, check out "Music for 18 Musicians", "It's Gonna Rain", "Come out to show them", and if memory serves "Pulses" (might have that title wrong) which is literally just a bunch of mechanical metronomes which go in and out of phase as they wind down.
Thank you for the contribution! TIL :)
You were thinking of Gygöry Ligeti's "Poème symphonique"[0] in your last example there. Steve Reich did write "Pendulum Music"[1] where microphones are swung from cables over loudspeakers and the feedback goes in and out of phase as the microphones return to stillness.
Aah yes you're right on both of those of course. It was like 25years ago I studied 20th century music. So weird to think that...
Fireflies solve this problem with only local knowledge... maybe a variation of the problem that attacks/constrains it in a similar way?
The physical metronomes are using phase, not frequency, to synchronize. On top of that, they all start off at approximately the same frequency.
So just having a global average frequency is not the same thing.
Specifically: They tick in one direction faster than the other, which causes them to slowly shift phase.
You've got me thinking about multiplying two imperfect oscillators together.
Thanks for your contribution. I just wanted to add some context for the problem of N items that share a median value and they want to reach independently all the same value. :) Thanks for the specification!
When people simulating real-time physics, it's almost always a bad idea to use semaphores like that. Instead, all pieces of the systems are normally simulated in lockstep. If the system has sufficient computations, a simulation step can be parallelized to use multiple CPU cores, but they are synchronized at every timestep of the simulation. Otherwise it will inevitably fail, there are way too many reasons for unfairness in the scheduler: other processes, hyperthreading, NUMA, unequal cooling/throttling, and more.