A bit of fun!

 Another offering from AEON which surprised me.

I hope you also find it surprising.                                                                             

I sent the following to our friend Ian Gibbins:

The video on waves was big news for me Ian, but possibly old news for you? However I would still like to hear your comments on that piece. You may know of some which take it further?

And this is what came back from Ian:

"The video is really good - but that underlying phenomenon has been well known for ages. The original versions used metal plates with sand or salt on them and then the edges of the plates were bowed with a violin bow or tapped lightly with a mallet or whatever. 

The pattern of the vibrations is determined primarily by the resonant properties of the plate, or in the video, the container for the water, or whatever. The frequency and strength of the input also matters. 

There are many examples of this type of thing out there but I don’t have links for them. I’m pretty sure that they use similar techniques for working out the best resonance pattern for the bodies of string instruments, drums, and other musical instruments that rely on resonance for sound amplifications.

At least some of these properties can be modelled digitally to some degree. For example, many software audio synthesisers model the resonant properties of different materials e.g., steel, wood, glass to generate sounds.

I just looked up about the figures on bowed metal plates. That was described by Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni in 1785, a study that is considered to mark the origin of modern acoustics. This info is from a book “Instruments and the Imagination” by Thomas L Hankins and Robert j Silverman (Princeton University Press, 1995)."

Thanks for that information Ian, we may soon find something which takes this subject further.

pt