GOOD VIBRATIONS: The SHAPES of SOUND

The Field of Study is Called CYMATICS

If you have not already, time may come when you'll get around to watching the Lord of the Rings prequel RINGS OF POWER. If so, you know the INTRO I refer to here.

If not, skip ahead to watch a bit of the 90 seconds graphic-to-music that is the point of this abbreviated post. Find it here:

THE GRAPHIC

THE STORY ABOUT THE GRAPHIC

The shifting patterns are mesmerizing. I speculated how it might be done, but got it all wrong. Have any ideas you'd like to propose to explain HOW?

My ideas were way off. No magnetic particles and field patterns involved. The particles that dance and swish around the screen are just sand.

Read about the HOW: The story behind The Rings of Power opening credits sequence

THE WHY: CYMATICS

The creative force that produces the crop-circle-like pattern is SOUND. The study of patterns that sound vibration makes is known as CYMATICS. This was not a term I had never run across, so I explored.

And apparently I am way late to the game: the phenomenon caught the attention of the likes of Da Vinci, Galileo, Hooke, Faraday and others. You can do a search for “history of cymatics” and stay busy for quite a while.

AND THEN THERE IS THE SO-WHAT

Revealing previously hidden patterns in fluids or scattered fine particles, is, indeed, kind of spooky-fascinating. And much is being made of the implications of this purportedly-pervasive cosmic phenomenon to explain everything from the BIG BANG (note that the BANG here would have been the highest-energy SOUND ever in the cosmos) to how deaf musicians perceive and compose music.

For instance, see the list of larger-world connections to CYMATICS made by a site touting the CYMASCOPE. There is good information here. There is also speculation and perhaps a bit of WooWoo at the leading edges in places.

No doubt, since vibration is a property of our Earth-based material existence, anything that can shed light on the manifestations of SOUND on FORM is worth understanding better. At least we now have a word for it.

EXTRA: BECAUSE I AM A GEEK

I had collected a few screen grabs (mostly from the cymascope site) when first reading about cymatics a few weeks ago, and put them on a pasteboard (ARC browser “easel”).

I will share the link, just to be sure readers can access it with this post, and maybe make better use of such pasteboards for future posts. So go to this link for the CYMATICS EASEL in my ARC BROWSER to embiggen the screenshot below. Let me know of problems or other user experience.

🔥 NOTE that most of the objects on the whiteboard are clickable from the easel at the link above, and take you to the source. Kind of handy.