Rhythmic Light
Rhythmic Light, Ltd is a small team of designers and developers who are working to make the vision of synthesizers for creating visual art as real as synthesizers for creating sonic art. We aspire to function in ways that are viable and inviting to others who share our interest.
Fred Collopy taught software design for over four decades at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and at Case Western Reserve’s Weatherhead School of Management where he is Professor Emeritus of Design and Innovation. He was a visiting scholar with Cornell’s Human Interaction Group and in the Computer Music Group at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Lab. He co-edited Managing as Designing (Stanford University Press, 2004).
Imager was born of Fred’s frustration with video collaboration and a passion for art in general. Its many iterations are book-ended by a 1979 Apple II version, enabled by that computer’s relatively high resolution and support for Pappert’s turtle graphics, and this current one, spurred by a drive to design a highly responsive visual instrument requiring no more hardware than an iPad.
Jessie Linden is drummer/percussionist and indie Apple systems developer living in New York City. While cultivating her career as a Broadway musician, finding a home in iOS development was a delightful surprise brought on by a series of unfortunate events in 2020.
Jessie has since plunged headfirst into the pool, developing several personal projects, becoming a staff engineer at the critically acclaimed personal planner app Structured, and co-creating the Imager we know today. Her work touches all aspects of Imager’s development, focusing especially on marrying mobile app UX with instrument design, always grounded in concepts from both music and visual art. What she lacks in formal design training, she makes up for with a thorough attention to detail and a passion for making a product that is elegant and fun to use. Thanks to Imager, Jessie has discovered one of her favorite tasks: creating custom interactive components! Some of her work was shared in conference talks delivered at Swift Leeds 2023 and Deep Dish Swift 2024.
Donny Wals is an iOS author and teacher who has written and lectured extensively on software design and development. He applies his experience in programming practices and data architectures to insuring performance matching that of the most intuitive and integrated apps.
Site archives
In 1998, Fred established RhythmicLight.com as a location for collecting together research on visual music. His goals at that time were to support the development of Imager and to gather and share as much relevant information as possible. An earlier version of the site is archived at the 1998-2018 RhythmicLight site.