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November 23, 2014 10:31 AM   Subscribe

"Cymatics is the science of visualizing audio frequencies."

Behind the scenes with the director, cinematographer, and musician (includes making-of videos!)

Previously, previouslier.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering (6 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
When it slipped into slow-mo the scientific part of my brain got annoyed, cause "Obviously the sounds no longer correlate pfft." But this is pretty freakin' cool anyway, so thanks for posting it!
posted by STFUDonnie at 10:51 AM on November 23, 2014


The main video itself is cool - good for them for making it - but the real treasure here is the making of videos in which they go into each effect (all links to vimeo):

Chiadni Plate
Speaker dish
hose pipe
Ruben's tube
Ferrofluid
Tesla coil

A couple of points:
1) Of course, they were thinking about this from the beginning as being a music video, so some of the effects (speaker dish, hose pipe) are dependent upon the interaction of video frame rate and physical phenomenon.
2) Interestingly, they are also clear that they chose pitches for the song based on whether they created cool visual effects. It would have also been possible to make the music first and then tune the systems to respond to the pitches, by changing the size of the chiadni plates, for example.
3) Using the tesla coil the way they did is just as insane as you'd expect - if you watch only one video, watch that one. AFAIK they didn't use the tesla coil to generate sound like in this video, but only for the visual effect (and it isn't responding to the audio either).

Some effects they could have added:
Cornstarch and speakers
More fun with water
Breaking glass
Levitating objects with sound
posted by ianhattwick at 11:41 AM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


err all of those videos are on the 'musician' link :)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:43 AM on November 23, 2014


This is great thanks
posted by alfanut at 6:34 PM on November 23, 2014


Earlier today I was talking to our seven year old about the fact that all music is produced by vibration, whether it's an acoustic string or reed vibrating or sound waves being turned into electricity and then amplified. And this this fantastic video comes along illustrating so much of what we had been talking about and exploring.
posted by vverse23 at 8:26 PM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


Actually, the bit where the hose pipe appears to have a spiral of water that moves out of the hose and then reverses direction to spiral backward is not just a camera trick: it's also a quite interesting visual illusion known as the wagon-wheel effect.
posted by nicodine at 2:05 PM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


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