Cymatics: Music That You Can See

We all know that music is a series of vibrations, but we hear those effects and generally don’t see them. What if we could see them though? That’s what the science of Cymatics is all about. It allows us to see those audio vibrations, and the results are surprisingly orderly and beautiful.

In this excellent video, Nigel Stanford utilizes a Chladni Plate (a speaker with a metal plate attached), hose pipe, speaker dish (a dish of liquid on top of a speaker), Ferro Fluid (a magnetic liquid), a plasma ball, a Rueben’s Tube (long pipe filled with propane), and a Tesla coil to perform a song specifically intended to show off the field.

After you watch the video, go to his Behind The Scenes page to see more deeply into each experiment. It’s very cool to finally see what we’ve been listening to for so long.