Cymatics

What’s ‘cymatics’ I hear you ask? It’s visualising sound waves using sand. I had some bits and bobs kicking around so I thought I’ll give it a bash.

So what am I looking at? I have a single speaker driver sat just underneath a piece of dark paper with some salt spread on top. The speaker driver is hotwired up to a cheapy (£6 ish) amp bought from amazon with a laptop as the input source. Playing through the laptop is a tone generator website. Play a tone, turn up the amp and the salt organises itself into a shape representing a 2d slice of the 3d soundwave being projected by the speaker driver… with me so far? The lower the tone (frequency) of the sound wave, the more sparse the shapes (sound waves), the higher the tone, the closer the waves appear together.

Google it.

Incidentally, the speaker drivers I used were smashed and grabbed from a manky set of sony speakers found by the roadside. Funny what sets off particular turn of events…