Track in the Shape of the White of a Cat

A friend posted a picture of their cat, showing its belly as it lay spread across a threshold and suggested that it looked like an audio waveform and essentially dared someone to create such an audio waveform. So I did.
enter image description here

The sound is essentially arbitrary, but it was a fun little challenge to figure a smooth way to make a sound with a waveform that matched (closely) a given image. The length is totally arbitrary, but I figured 35 seconds was plenty.

packing superellipses

I was wanting to pack superellipses tightly, so I worked out how to get two of them to be tangent to each other, and this allows me to create superellipses that are as large as possible and so fill space well. For this image, I turned off the requirement that the superellipses not be inside one another, and I think it has a nice look to it.
superellipses

These are all 4-exponent superellipses (i.e., their shapes are the same as that of x4+y4=1).

Benjamin Peret poem

GROWN OLD THE DEVIL BECOMES A HERMIT

Louis-Phillipe is tall for his age
Give him some pennies
his cap will be too small
Give him two neckties
he'll lie every day
Give him another pipe
his mother will cry
Give him a pair of gloves
he'll lose his shoes
Give him coffee
he'll have blisters
Give him a corset
he'll wear a collar
Give him suspenders
he'll heal mice
Give him a club
he'll board a plane
Give him soup
he'll make a statue of it
Give him shoelaces
he'll eat gooseberries

It's Monsieur Phillipe
who lives on pills and blotting-paper
eats his mother
and forgets time walking

--Benjamin Peret (trans. Marilyn Kallet)