Just recently a music visualization on my buddy's xbox has cought my attention. It's a sort of random particle movements that resembles those neat particle tracks you might have seen in some physics class.

I thought this could be an awesome effect to know in f.ex. Photoshop or other equivalent programs. So I've searced around on the net, but I don't seem to find anything particular. And thus I've come to the conclusion that I might have to find a technique for it myself.

The thing I want to create is a picture like this:
http://www.scifair.org/images/ParticleTracks.jpg

I'm no expert in Photoshop, nor am I a designer by occupation and need some help figuring this out.
My first thought was to just simply make a long path, manually smooth it out, and stroke it. It somewhat works, but it's medlesome and doesn't produce too good results unless you spend a really long time on it.

My other thought was if there was some kind of way to automaticly smooth out a full path, but I haven't found any such tool. Also briefly looked at Illustrator, but since I'm rather new to it I didn't find anything there either.

I asked one of my flatmates if he had any ideas and he said that it might be possible to create the twirls with a partially random generated image from php, it can be an idea, but it wouldn't really be scalable I think, and it probably only works on the twirl and won't give any other particle movements.

So my question ends at whether anyone have any good ideas on how to make this effect. Not necessarily in two steps, but in a less time consuming way than manually making the full path and stroke it.

Gogo shoot some good ideas at me!