cymatic mandalas [View all]

Here's something I've been playing around with the last couple weeks. They're cymatic "mandalas," generated by photographing colored lights reflected from the surface of vibrating water, on which pure, low frequency tones produce standing waves. The water was in a black petri dish centered inside a speaker cone, and photographed from above. It's so cool seeing these figures emerge as I ramp up the volume. These were generated with frequencies in the 20 Hz to 30 Hz range-- I forgot to record them. Each image is monocolor and captures only the reflections visible during each exposure, so multiple exposures of the same standing wave reflections were layered in Photoshop to produce the complete figures.