Cymatics - Seeing the sound
Video of the workshop: clic here
A music video of astonishing beauty midway between art and science: “Cymatics”, by the New Zealander musician Nigel Stanford.
Stanford’s idea has been to associate with each musical instrument a spectacular method to display its sound. A tube of fire for the organ, a water hose for the drum, the ferrofluid for the primary keyboard, and so on. For the secondary keyboard instead he used a metal plate on which the sand dances magically creating geometric patterns corresponding to the played notes.
Cymatics (from the greek “kyma” = wave) is precisely the discipline that studies the sound visualisation. Resonance frequencies, nodal lines, stationary waves, are apparently complex concepts that become easily understood thanks to their display.
In this workshop you can play with all these methods of sound visualisation, and play different notes to try the most fascinating motifs.
– Concept: Cesco Reale (Italian Festival of Mathematical Games).
– Realisation: Luciano Franceschi (CEMEA Veneto). Giampaolo Mazza and the CEMEA Sperimentation Group. Luigi Gratton e Stefano Oss (Laboratory of Physical Science Communication – Department of Physics – University of Trento – Italy).
– We thank for the collaboration Nigel Stanford, author of the video Cymatics.