Sort Wave

Sort Wave is a screen full of shuffled bars and an algorithm working through them in real time. Every comparison and every write is drawn as it happens, so you are watching the method rather than the result. Bubble sort crawls the largest value to the right end over and over, building a finished band that grows from the edge inward. Insertion sort keeps a tidy sorted region on the left and shuffles each new bar back into place. Selection sort sweeps the whole remaining range looking for a minimum, then makes one decisive swap. Quick sort scatters everything into partitions that suddenly resolve. Merge sort works in silent halves that snap together.

Each operation plays a short tone pitched to the value being touched, and that is what turns a visualisation into something you want to keep watching. A nearly sorted region produces a rising scale; a shuffled one produces noise; quick sort's partitioning has a distinctive scattered clatter that sounds nothing like bubble sort's steady chirping. Tones are throttled so that even at the highest speed it stays musical rather than becoming a wall of sound.

When an algorithm finishes, a confirmation sweep runs left to right, turning each bar green in turn and playing its note — the sorted array played back as a clean ascending scale. Speed controls how many operations are executed per frame, from single-stepping slowly enough to follow every comparison up to finishing two hundred bars almost instantly. Bar count is adjustable too, which changes the character of each algorithm considerably. Free in the browser, nothing to install.