Making sound visible through cymatics
I’m guessing this will most likely take most people by surprise… well it did me, anyway =) That sound can form geometric patterns just seems so logical and elegant, yet at the same time I would’ve never thought it possible. It’s extremely interesting to me that it seems there’s an abundance of coherent phenomena, similar patterns appearing in a lot of areas where you just wouldn’t expect them to. Ancient greek philosophers were the first to discover (or at least claim) that maths are a universally true language of the universe, and somehow, I feel that cymatics connects to that ancient assertion in an interesting way.
Science uses the language of mathematics to describe Nature, however, Nature doesn’t use or need mathematics. It just is. Like almost everything else in Nature, sound is based on ‘periodic movement.’ Such movements can of course be described mathematically and when plotted on a graph the shape looks wave-like so the scientific community erroneously use the term ‘sound wave’ to describe sound. However, the space-form of sound is actually a bubble so we should be describing sound as such. If we could see sound bubbles the world would be seen to have another level of beauty, shimmering around us, each with a kaleidoscopic-like pattern on its surface. What the CymaScope does can be likened to an MRI scanner taking a slice through a body. The CymaScope shows us an analog of the interior structure of a sound bubble and yes, the patterns are wonderfully geometric, provided the source sound is harmonic. Dissonant sounds create chaotic, irregular patterns which begs the question: what effect does our immersion in noisy environments have on our cells? John Stuart Reid / CymaScope.com
Thanks for the comment!
– I didn’t mean to suggest that mathematics is actually a tangible “construction element” of reality. I meant more in a philosophical sense that maths are the main way we’ve found to express the discoveries we make, and that there seem to be an awful lot of overlapping, coherent phenomena.
I guess I would say that I mainly see (at least at present) the effects of a chaotic sound environment as psychological .. I’m sure I’m like most people in this regard. It never really crossed my mind that there could be a physiological impact as well, apart from the obvious “overloading of the system”, weapons-grade applications of sound used in e.g. alarm systems and the US military.
Do you know if there’s research being done into this sort of thing, is this something you’re working with?