Where the bow strokes in relation to your finger will dictate which mode of vibration you excite. The sand will begin to bounce about on the plate until settling at nodal points (areas of zero movement) thereby producing intricate patterns. The plate will ring loudly if you manage to excite a mode of vibration!

Begin to stroke the side of the plate with a Cello or Violin bow. Hold the plate with your finger or thumb at a point on the edge. Then sprinkles fine sand or salt on top of plate. Take a flat sheet of metal, either circular or square, and mount on a central stalk to a sturdy base. Try Chladni’s experiment: The Chladni plates are probably the most basic and simple way to see cymatics in action. These patterns are now known as ‘Chladni Figures.’ He used a sand-strewn brass plate, excited by a violin bow since brass is a highly resonant material he found that a large number of archetypal geometric patterns could be created, depending on where on the edge of the plate the bow was drawn. German musician and scientist, sometimes known as ‘the father of acoustics,’ almost certainly had access to Hooke’s work but it is Chladni who history has chosen to acknowledge for his major study of this class of phenomena. It was this simple idea that led him to invent the telephone because he realized that if the sound of a voice could move a membrane by a tiny amount, that movement could be converted into an electric current fluctuating in sympathy with the voice sounds. To help Mabel and some of the younger children at his Boston school avoid collisions with horse- drawn carriages approaching from behind, he conceived a simple idea: If they walked outside holding a balloon they would feel the sounds made by the carriages through their fingertips.Īlexander realized that the balloon’s surface would tremble in sympathy with the sound of the approaching carriages and alert the children to their presence. He fell in love with one of his students, Mabel, a young woman of 17 years, who had lost her hearing in childhood through contracting scarlet fever. The Scottish born Alexander Graham Bell moved to Boston with his deaf parents in 1870 and became a teacher of the deaf.

Feeling good vibrations- a Fun experiment!

Cymatics project x free