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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cymatics | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:18:32.201545+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Influences on art and music == Devices for displaying nodal images have influenced visual arts and contemporary music. Artist Björk created projections of cymatics patterns by using bass frequencies on tour for her album Biophilia. Hans Jenny's book on Chladni figures influenced Alvin Lucier and helped lead to Lucier's composition Queen of the South. Jenny's work was also followed up by Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) founder György Kepes at MIT. His work in this area included an acoustically vibrated piece of sheet metal in which small holes had been drilled in a grid. Small flames of gas burned through these holes and thermodynamic patterns were made visible by this setup. In the mid-1980s, visual artist Ron Rocco, who also developed his work at CAVS, employed mirrors mounted to tiny servo motors, driven by the audio signal of a synthesizer and amplified by a tube amp to reflect the beam of a laser. This created light patterns which corresponded to the audio's frequency and amplitude. Using this beam to generate video feedback and computers to process the feedback signal, Rocco created his "Andro-media" series of installations. Rocco later formed a collaboration with musician David Hykes, who practiced a form of Mongolian overtone chanting with The Harmonic Choir, to generate cymatic images from a pool of liquid mercury, which functioned as a liquid mirror to modulate the beam of a Helium-Neon laser from the sound thus generated. Photographs of this work can be found in the Ars Electronica catalog of 1987. Contemporary German photographer and philosopher Alexander Lauterwasser has brought cymatics into the 21st century using finely crafted crystal oscillators to resonate steel plates covered with fine sand and to vibrate small samples of water in Petri dishes. His first book, Water Sound Images, translated into English in 2006, features imagery of light reflecting off the surface of water set into motion by sound sources ranging from pure sine waves to music by Beethoven, Karlheinz Stockhausen, electroacoustic group Kymatik (who often record in ambisonic surround sound) and overtone singing. The resulting photographs of standing wave patterns are striking. Lauterwasser's book focused on creating detailed visual analogues of natural patterns ranging from the distribution of spots on a leopard to the geometric patterns found in plants and flowers, to the shapes of jellyfish and the intricate patterns found on the shell of a tortoise. Composer Stuart Mitchell and his father T.J. Mitchell claimed that Rosslyn Chapel's carvings supposedly contain references to cymatics patterns. In 2005 they created a work called The Rosslyn Motet realised by attempting to match various Chladni patterns to 13 geometric symbols carved onto the faces of cubes emanating from 14 arches. The musical group The Glitch Mob used cymatics to produce the music video "Becoming Harmonious (ft. Metal Mother)". Influenced by yantra diagrams and cymatics, artist and fashion designer Mandali Mendrilla created a sculpture dress called "Kamadhenu" (Wish Tree Dress III) the pattern of which is based on a Yantra diagram depicting goddess Kamadhenu. Aphex Twin suggests learning more about cymatics in reference to 'master tuning of 440 Hz' in a conversation with synth-maker Tatsuya Takahashi. Since 2010, the art collective Analema Group creates participatory performances in which cymatic patterns are produced digitally in real-time by the audience. In 2014 musician Nigel Stanford produced "Cymatics", an instrumental and music video designed to demonstrate the visual aspects of cymatics. In 2016 songwriter and former Arizona State Quarterback Samson Szakacsy brought a cymatics device he called "the Drawing Machine" on tour and had each set draw live to portray how music looks. Contemporary American painter Jimmy O'Neal created his own cymascope, which he has used to produce various works of public art. One such painting is 511.95 Hz of wine, a large-scale mural based on the pattern created when tracing a finger around the rim of a nearly-empty wine glass. In 2020 an official medal was issued by the Royal Dutch Mint to mark the 65th anniversary of the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by the city of Rotterdam . A 3D scanner was able to capture the cymatics shapes of a vibrating dish filled with water from the Maas river. To create the coin, all the historical winning songs from previous contests were mixed together and emitted through a speaker.video, The logo and theme art for Eurovision 2022 is based on cymatics. The main title sequence for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is inspired by cymatics.
== Influences in engineering == Inspired by periodic and symmetrical patterns at the air-liquid interface created by sound vibration, P. Chen and coworkers developed a method to engineer diverse structures from microscale materials using liquid-based templates. This liquid-based template can be dynamically reconfigured by tuning vibration frequency and acceleration.
== See also == Mechanical resonance Megan Watts Hughes, inventor of the "eidophone" Music visualization Rayleigh's quotient in vibrations analysis Strobe light Vibration of plates Visual music
== References ==
== External links == How to Make a Chladni Plate Experiment