Here you can watch me creating some new cymatic plates in my studio from beginning to end.
The materials are steel, enamel, and Aluminum Sulfate.
Thanks to my sister Sara for taking the photos!
I just discovered this artist working with cymatics on the Kinetica (art museum in the UK) site. Her name is Amrik Perera and she is using ultrasound to create light and water installations that are quite beautiful. Check out her work at: http://www.theluminaries.com/frequency1.html
The other night I wanted to do a quick Cymatics experiment at my house, as I didn’t have time to go to my studio that day. I came up with a cool cymatics effect using only a wine glass, some water, some food coloring, and some salt.
I ended up creating a blue vortex inside the wine glass - very beautiful, and very simple to do.
Here’s how to do it yourself:
1. Get a wine glass, some food color (darker colors like red or blue work best) some salt.
2. Fill the wine glass with water about 2/3 full.
3. Sprinkle some salt into the bottom of the wineglass (about 1/4 tsp).
4. Drop about 5 drops of food coloring right into the center of the water. (Don’t disturb the glass or stir).
5. Holding the stem of the wineglass, with it sitting firmly on the table, wet your finger and run it continuously around the rim of the wineglass (you’ve probably done this before or seen it done) until the glass is ’singing.’ Keep doing this - going around in a circle in the SAME direction.
6. Watch the ‘vortex’ form inside the glass! You will also see, if you observe closely, some cymatics patterns radiating inward from the sides of the glass, on the surface of the water.
Note: I am not sure exactly why the salt makes this work better, from my observation it draws and weights the color toward the bottom of the glass, anchoring it in the center there, so that it makes a better vortex in the middle than if you didn’t have salt in the glass.
Pretty cool…
Do you have a home-brewed cymatic experiment you would like to share with me? Leave a comment here, and you can also join my School of Cymatics, create your own Cymatics page, and post your cymatics videos here: http://www.cymatics.ning.com
My friend Rebekah recently mentioned that she was watching a violin maker use cymatics during the crafting of violins. I looked into this and discovered in Alexander Lautervasser’s book Water Sound Images a photo of violin backs with cymatic patterns in the particles sitting in them. Apparently it is a long tradition among violin makers to look at the cymatic patterns created inside or on the violin while it is being made to help them perfect the violin’s build. I don’t know if this is the case with guitars or other similar instrument, but I would not be surprised. I also was not able to discover exactly how they use the cymatics, or what material is used to create the patterns. Do you know anything further about this practice? If so, leave a comment! Thanks…
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Quite a bit has been done with successfully photographing Cymatics images at this point…
That is how Hans Jenny recorded his work with Cymatics, and there are a few other people around the world who currently create Cymatics images and photograph them, with beautiful results.
However, the question I am addressing here is “how do you imprint Cymatics on physical objects?”
This is a very new field of experimentation, but there are a few (about 3, to be exact) people in the world that I have found who are working on it and have begun to have some success (myself included).
Watch this video to find out what techniques and materials have been used to imprint Cymatics images directly on physical objects, in other words making fluid Cymatics images permanent…
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I recorded this cymatics video to show a closeup view of what the salt actually looks like as it is moving around the vibrating plate.
The fascinating thing when watching cymatics is how the illusion of a solid form is created by vibration - matter holds what is a recognizeable form that appears to be one shape - yet, when we look at it closeup, as in this video, you can see that the matter shaping the form is in constant motion, no one particle remaining in one place for even a fraction of a second, but incessantly changing places with the other particles. And yet it holds it’s shape…
The interesting point is to understand how this is happening all around and even within us at any given moment, within the shapes we percieve as “solid.”
Can you picture the incessant dance your cells are doing as they are in constant motion, continually exchanging particles and places, yet giving you the appearance of a solid, unchanging form?…
Watch this fascinating and well-done video to find out about what is believed to be cymatics “music frozen in stone” in a chapel in Scotland.
There are what appears to be cymatics patterns carved into stone cubes throughout this chapel, and Stuart Mitchell has spent years studying them.
He used cymatics - a plate on an oscillator from what I can tell, similar to the apparatus Hans Jenny used - to re-create the patterns, and see what tones matched to each design.
Then he had musicians recreate the music carved in the stone and bring it back to life after centuries of silence…but it doesn’t stop there. There is a sculpture of an angel at one end of the chapel that gave some interesting clues along the way. Play it to find out what I mean.
This video is particularly interesting to watch because it alternates from pictures of the stone cubes to patterns being created with cymatics, so you can instantly compare.
Is this cymatics-generated “music frozen in stone” meant to be discovered and sung hundreds of years in the fututre? Or just a (very striking and strange) “coincidence?”
What do you think?
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Dr. June Weider is a self-described ‘bone toner’ I met at the Cymatics Conference in Atlanta this year.
Here she talks about her fascinating work ‘toning’ the bones of the human spine with sound.
She talks about the frequencies of our spine, and how she has learned to bring them back into ‘tune’ with their original frequecies when they become what can be called ‘out of tune.’
She was kind enough to give me a longer interview about her work, how exactly it works and how she learned to do it, so if you you are intrigued by what she says in this video, keep your eyes open and iIwill be making that interview available soon…
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This is my first experiment with playing a cymatics plate with black powder on white.
The plate is steel, the surface is white enamel and I am sprinkling powdered graphite on the surface before playing it.
Notice how the graphite moves - it looks pretty magical, since you can’t see the grains moving like salt or sand does, it reminds me of black clouds or the way silt moves under water.
I am pretty happy with how this turned out, now the trick is going to be preserving the surface…
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In this video I talk about what a cymatics tonascope is (there seems to be some confusion about this out there, for example a metal plate and oscillator is not a ‘tonascope’) - and how you you can make one yourself.
A cymatics tonascope is used to make the human voice visible, and you can make one to experiment with and show your friends and family a live cymatics demonstration in under an hour. It should cost less than $20 altogether.
I made a cymatics tonascope just like the one I describe here for my cymatics art experiments, as well as a half-scale model for a 4 year old boy who loved it.
Children can easily play cymatics tonascopes and it is an excellent way for them to learn about sound waves and cymatics. Everyone’s voice will look different, and each voice will create many different patterns depending on how you “sing” into it.
One note: you don’t have to know how to sing to play a cymatics tonascope! If you can say “aaaa” “oooo” and “eeee” you will get some beautiful patterns!