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The shape of sound


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Quote Originally Posted by 1001gear View Post
Yeh but the shapes are so geometrically ordered. Implications are many. I just can't unfoggum.
It's sort of the shape of sound, indirectly speaking. What you're seeing is a normal mode phenomenon, which accounts for all forms of resonance. Basically you have a standing wave that causes a diaphragm to vibrate with especially prominent peaks at certain spatial intervals (In this case, radially arranged yielding some interesting shapes/patterns). The higher amplitude vibrations in those areas cause the salt to "fall" into the valleys between and accumulate there.

A google search for "normal mode" and "cymatics" should help.


From the "Normal Mode" entry on Wikipedia:

"A normal mode of an oscillating system is a pattern of motion in which all parts of the system move sinusoidally with the same frequency and with a fixed phase relation. The motion described by the normal modes is called resonance. The frequencies of the normal modes of a system are known as its natural frequencies or resonant frequencies. A physical object, such as a building, bridge or molecule, has a set of normal modes that depend on its structure, materials and boundary conditions.

When relating to music, normal modes of vibrating instruments (strings, air pipes, drums, etc.) are called "harmonics" or "overtones".

The most general motion of a system is a superposition of its normal modes. The modes are normal in the sense that they can move independently, that is to say that an excitation of one mode will never cause motion of a different mode.

The concept of normal modes also finds application in wave theory, optics, quantum mechanics, and molecular dynamics."


"A mode of vibration is characterized by a modal frequency and a mode shape, and is numbered according to the number of half waves in the vibration. For example, if a vibrating beam with both ends pinned displayed a mode shape of half of a sine wave (one peak on the vibrating beam) it would be vibrating in mode 1. If it had a full sine wave (one peak and one valley) it would be vibrating in mode 2.

In a system with two or more dimensions, such as the pictured disk, each dimension is given a mode number. Using polar coordinates, we have a radial coordinate and an angular coordinate. If you measured from the center outward along the radial coordinate you would encounter a full wave, so the mode number in the radial direction is 2. The other direction is trickier, because only half of the disk is considered due to the antisymmetric (also called skew-symmetry) nature of a disk's vibration in the angular direction. Thus, measuring 180
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Quote Originally Posted by BonsoWonderDog View Post
Both Zoink and Droolmaster in my thread! IT SHALL BE MY SUPERTHREAD !!!!

1001gear - I'm not clever enough to speak of the implications. I just thought it was interesting.
Very interesting indeed. I've seen that stuff before and this time it hit me that the sound can manifest in physical structure so like; fog ... acoustic locks, surgery, crop circles, lol fog lol etc...

@Zoink, very enlightening info. Thanks.
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