12 Piano notes made visible for the first time | Hacker News Reader

12 Piano notes made visible for the first time

cymascope.com

46 pointsthinker16 comments

For the first time in history individual piano notes have been made visible using the CymaScope instrument.

Except for all the times someone fed the output of a mic amplifier into a scope and watched a Lissajous figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve Not to mention Duddell's photo oscillograph over 100 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope_history#Photograph...

Or... it's been done for 'thousands of years', more recently described in 1787 by Ernst Chladni http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Chladni.

There are descriptions of this process in ancient Arab and Indian texts, and the results match images drawn in sacred spaces around the world.

The simple way to see these images is to place fine sand or similar medium on a tight drum skin, and play an instrument (or even sing a sustained note) loudly near the drum. The sand will 'dance' to various set patterns, widely differing for each note: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtiSCBXbHAg [please do watch this video, it's easy to imagine that this could have been seen through history by drummers - and give it a try at home, it's really easy to do, and blows kids/friends/spouses minds!]

The cryptic symbols in Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland may be musical instructions, copied down from the shapes formed during the processes described above, before written music was mainstream, and used to decorate the ceiling of the chapel: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_rosslyn_code/2011/05/...

Yes

Still it's not clear what they are doing with the sound, and how they're plotting it

I guess they could be using "partials":

>Any complex tone "can be described as a combination of many simple periodic waves (i.e., sine waves) or partials, each with its own frequency of vibration, amplitude, and phase." A partial is any of the sine waves by which a complex tone is described.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_%28music%29#Par...

Ahem: "...using the CymaScope instrument".

Though I do notice that crucial bit was dropped in the headline...

I can't add much more about what they're doing; I can't bring myself to read about God's vibrations of the universe etc..

"The CymaScope represents the first scientific instrument that can give us a visual image of sound and vibration - a cymatic image - helping us to understand our world and universe in ways previously hidden from view." ... you can graph change in pressure over time to get a visual image of sounds and vibrations. It is safe to say people have been doing this for a very long time. And what about the page on "sonic healing"... What a crazy site!

Like this little "fact box": http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/soundhealingimages/Pr..., only reference to "Prime Resonance Frequency" I could find on the web was on a few new-age sites, and apparently they have managed to find the frequency at which a cell vibrates.

So, this is like Chladni patterns, but in 3D and high definition? Or just Chladni patterns with high framerate? I'm having a hard time interpreting this from very vague and pretty uninformative descriptions.

Frank Zappa stated on multiple ocassions that he considered himself, in essence, an air sculptor. I'd love to see few of his "sculptures" animated in 3D.

So what do the images depict? Is it some density map in polar coordinates? Fourier? What am I seeing here?

Camera images of a fluid on a circular membrane would be my best guess:

http://www.cymascope.com/cymascope.html

http://www.cymascope.com/gallery.html

"If we sample a moment from music and analyze it in terms of its fundamental frequency and associated harmonics, and then apply that sample to, say, a circular latex membrane of known elasticity, known diameter and fixed edge, present mathematical techniques cannot predict what pattern will form on the membrane."

If you knew the resonate frequency of the membrane I wouldn't think this would be that hard to figure out using Fourier analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_analysis

I think I prefer the iTunes visualizer.

Milkdrop is probably the best general visualizer ever made. There used to be an iTunes port but I think it died long ago, which is too bad.

These are very pretty visualisations. I agree with others here that the page is "interesting" and seems to lack detail about the process.

The visualisations reminded me of the book "Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty" by Clifford Pickover.

http://www.amazon.com/Computers-Pattern-Chaos-Beauty-Graphic...

This looks like a goofy amateur science thing.

>"The CymaScope is a new type of scientific instrument that makes sound visible."

Really? Because we have been making sound visible for centuries. I have around 40 plugins in my Logic Pro that "make sound visible".

>"The CymaScope has applications in almost every branch of science simply because vibration underpins all matter. The ability to see such vibrations permits a depth of study previously unavailable to scientists, engineers and researchers."

Really? Because it seems rather simple to make one...

>"Music, in the absolute sense, is the invisible geometry of the cosmos, a delicate tracery of frequencies that harmonise with each other and from which all matter manifests."

Only if you define "music" very loosely, and probably not even then.

MMV technology is still under development but as this excerpt from Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" shows, an exciting future lies ahead when all music can be transcribed to MusicMadeVisible.

I preferred the laser shows at the planetarium when I was a teen.

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