Cymatics is the study of sound in matter. A quick Googling of “cymatics experiment” will bring up some awesome videos of various forms of matter undulating to life under the influence of sonic vibrations. Ever since I first saw this effect, I’ve wanted to give it a try myself, and just the last weekend I realized I had all the gear I needed at my disposal.
This is rough, but I’m excited by how easy it was to make this much progress. I’m hoping to develop and refine this into a sound art installation which gives control of the pitch and velocity of the sound to the participant/viewer.
This is how I hobbled this experiment together. I used my speaker/drum setup, which emits sound within a drum. I put some water in an extra drum skin, and sealed another skin on top to make a kind of drumskin sandwich. The drumskin sandwich becomes a kind of petri dish for the water. Place it on the speaker/drum et voila! L’alchimie!
I think this would be much more effective if I put a light source directly into the drum, but this is prototype action! That’s right. So I used this image projector for tracing that I had handy. Now that I know the basic premise works I’m going to see if I can find an opportunity to build this nice for an event or installation.