The Power of Vibration
One of the first people in our time to render vibration into visible forms was the eighteenth-century German physicist Ernst Chladni, who began by scattering sand on steel disks and observing the changing patterns produced by playing various notes on a violin. These “Chladni figures” which have so inspired artists and symbolists, result from the fact that the disk resonates to the violin only in certain places, shifting the sand to those areas which are inert. Chladni’s work inspired the late Hans Jenny of Zurich to spend ten years duplicating and expanding his experiments with sophisticated equipment, and he named the pursuit cymatics, the study of the interrelationship of waveforms with matter. […]