Sound Made Visible

Cymatics is the study of sound made visible. It comes from the Greek word ‘kyma’ meaning wave. We are used to seeing sound captured digitally as 2D waveforms, but cymatics provides a way to peek inside the hidden world of sound at a deeper level and visualize how sound interacts with matter, including how it interacts with our own bodies. In fact, “the term soundwave is a misnomer since all audible sounds are bubble shaped. If we could see sound with our eyes, we would not see waves, as is commonly believed, but beautiful holographic bubbles, each with a shimmering kaleidoscope-like pattern on its surface”, as explained by cymascope.com. John Stuart Reid is the inventor of a device called the CymaScope which allows us to ‘see’ sound by applying sound vibrations to various mediums, such as water. The image below was produced with a Cymascope.

Image of sound vibrations in water produced on the Cymascope App

The beginning of this field of study goes all the way back to Galileo and has interested scientists like Robert Hooke (1680) and Ernst Chladni (1756) for centuries. The term cymatics was coined by Swiss medical doctor and scientist Hans Jenny in the 1960’s. He conducted numerous experiments over 14 years using sound (pure tones) to animate powders, pastes and liquids into forms and patterns. He often used a Chladni plate, which is a metal plate with a speaker underneath on which a medium like sand or salt is placed. As the frequencies and amplitudes of the sounds played change, the salt or sand creates complex geometric patterns on the plates. He noticed that the patterns created often mirrored patterns found in nature. The sound vibrations imprint geometric patterns of energy on the surface of a membrane or substance. Lower frequency sounds produce simple patterns and higher frequency sounds produce more complex patterns.

Sequence of patterns reflected on the surface of water being animated by steadily ascending frequencies from 10 to 160 Hz. Images by Alexander Lauterwasser from Water Sound Images ©2005

Cymatic shapes on a Chldani plate (right) resembling a turtle’s shell (left).

Cymatics is a wonderful way to help us visualize what sound can do for our own bodies. When we think of the vibratory nature of all matter and how we ourselves are vibratory beings, it is easy to imagine how sound vibrations are travelling through and interacting with our own bodies as we encounter noise, music, and voices of different frequencies throughout the day. Sound carries with it information. We can tell someone’s mood by hearing the tone of their voice. Every sound we hear carries a vibration that interacts with us on many levels. Sound can also be used intentionally to bring the brain and nervous system back into a state of coherence.

One of my favorite stories about how sound soothes us comes from Dr. John Beaulieu. Dr. Beaulieu began studying neural coherence while he was working at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City. In his laboratory there he had access to an anechoic chamber, a room of total silence and total darkness that is so devoid of noise the only sounds you can hear are the sounds that your own body makes. The chamber had been built by the CIA in the 1950’s in order to conduct experiments. When Dr. Beaulieu entered the chamber he said the only thing he could hear was the high pitched sound of his nervous system and a lower pitched sound of his blood circulating. He spent years and thousands of hours experimenting on himself in the chamber with various sounds and mantras. One afternoon he entered the chamber after he had a heated argument with a stranger on the subway. Upon entering the chamber he heard his nervous system producing an excruciating high pitched screaming noise. He had not even realized that the encounter had affected him to that degree until he was able to hear his own body in the anechoic chamber. Dr. Beaulieu had been experimenting with tuning forks and the nervous system so he grabbed 2 tuning forks, a C and a G and held them up to each ear. Instantly, the screeching noise was reduced to a low hum. That was the beginning of his research into using sound for neural coherence. If all of this is interesting to you, I invite you to look up the work of Dr. Hans Jenny or Dr. John Beaulieu and dive deeper.

For a beautiful and mesmerizing demonstration of sound made visual, please enjoy the video below in which Nigel Stanford uses several different cymatic mediums to explore the effects of sound on matter.