Cymatics: The Science of Sound

February 17, 2022
by: Jen

“There’s no organ system in the body that’s not affected by sound and music and vibration.”
— Mitchell Gaynor, M.D.

Sound has been considered an invisible force throughout history that blends into all aspects of our lives. Alarm clocks, sirens, snoring, and other jarring sounds jolt our nerves, while the sounds of soothing nature and music flow around us, lifting our spirit and inspiring us. Yet if we could see the actual sound, wouldn’t our world become even more beautiful and exciting?

If asked to visualize sounds, we might imagine a wave undulating through the air since we were taught that sound is a wave. But this model relates only to the graph of sound, not to what we might refer to as sound’s physical “space form”. Audible sounds actually travel through the air like bubbles. Sound bubbles pulsate in and out and it is the rhythmic movement of this pulsation that, when graphed, is depicted as a wave.

Cymatics is the science of sound made visible by nicely displaying the effects of vibration on the matter. This study is based on the physics principle that when a sound encounters a membrane, such as the surface of water or the membranes that surround our cells, a pattern of energy is automatically imprinted on the membrane. In other words, the periodic vibrations are, creating beautiful geometric patterns that reveal the once hidden realm of sound.

A simple demonstration of this process includes using a square metal, a violin bow, or a speaker. Salt or sand is sprinkled upon the plate in an irregular pattern. When the speaker generates a tone or strums the plate with the bow, the plate begins vibrating. The salt starts vibrating and forms a pattern upon the plate. Another popular method is using a bowl with water placed upon a speaker or simply water poured directly upon a water-resistant speaker cone. Science often makes for the most impressive and radical designer.

Now, when talking about cymatics origins, we can say that they blur the boundaries of arts and science. The generic term for this field was given by Hans Jenny (1904–1972). The word “cymatics” derives from the Greek “kuma” meaning “billow” or “wave”, to describe the periodic effects that sound, and vibration have on matter.

Swiss physician Hans Jenny grew up immersed in a musical family and was a hugely talented child pianist. He took his passion for music with him into his career in science, after he completed a doctorate in medicine and went to teach at the Rudolf Steiner School in Zurich.

In 1967, he published the first results of extensive experimentation in cymatics— Kymatic, a description of the periodic effects that sound and vibration have on matter, and his second in 1972. His two volumes are rich sources of imagery, which he observed and described in great detail, although leaving scientific and mathematical explanations to scientists who would come after him.

Hans Jenny said “If you spare a little of your imagination, as you watch this film as it runs, you will see many things that answer many questions, you will see living forms, living amoeba, almost animal like creatures. You will see continents being formed, the Earth itself coming to existence, explosions, eruptions, atomic explosions, and bombs. You can see all this and watch it before your eyes. Everything owes its existence solely and completely to sound”.

Work in this area had been carried out by great thinkers centuries before Hans Jenny. For example, in the late 1400s, after observing how the dust mites on his worktable created shapes when he vibrated the table, Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “I say that when a table is struck in different places the dust that is upon it is reduced to various shapes of mounds and tiny hillocks”. His close observation of dust under the influence of vibration was soundly made visible.

Galileo also observed the pleasing shapes created by oscillating particles in the early 17th century: “As I was scraping a brass plate with a sharp iron chisel in order to remove some spots from it and was running the chisel rather rapidly over it, I once or twice, during many strokes, heard the plate emit a rather strong and clear whistling sound: on looking at the plate more carefully, I noticed a long row of fine streaks parallel and equidistant from one another. Scraping with the chisel over and over again, I noticed that it was only when the plate emitted this hissing noise that any marks were left upon it; when this sibilant note did not accompany the scraping, there was not the least trace of such marks”.

When the microscope and telescope were invented, they opened vistas into realms that were not even suspected to exist. In 1680, Robert Hooke, an English scientist, architect, and polymath, who, using a microscope, was the first to visualize a microorganism, was able to see the nodal patterns associated with the modes of vibrations of glass plates as he ran a bow along the edge of a glass plate covered with flour.

Today, the science of visible sound offers insights into many fields of science, from astrophysics to zoology and almost every discipline in between. Cymatics is a natural process that is continually occurring inside our bodies, on the surface of everyday objects, and even at astronomical scales. Vibration underpins all matter in the Universe.

An interesting fact we have to share with you is that the world’s first scientific acoustic instrument that renders sound visible in the water, the CymaScope, developed by the acoustic-physics researcher, John Stuart Reid, can even help surgeons differentiate between healthy and cancerous cells during surgery, which could increase positive clinical outcomes of cancer surgery by creating cymatic images of the cells.

The CymaScope instrument makes sound visible by imprinting the vibrations of sound onto the surface of pure water, which is then “dusted” with light to make the resulting cymatic pattern visible.

“In general, cancer cells generate chaotic sounds, while healthy cells generate harmonious sounds. When we inject these sounds into the CymaScope instrument, the two types of cymatic patterns appear significantly different. With the healthy, harmonious sounds, we see stunning, symmetrical patterns, and with the cancerous cells we typically see ugly skewed patterns” said Reid.

Artists also continue to experiment with the formal properties of cymatics. There is a certain shamanistic, magical quality to much of it. The complex geometric designs that express the structure sound are exquisite. They remind us of the profound symmetries found throughout the natural world, from the unique geometry of a snowflake to the orbital pattern of the planet Venus.

The forms created can be seen as mandalas. In fact, everywhere you look in nature, these structures are visible.

Be warned… once you notice this phenomenon, no walk in nature will ever be the same again!

Twelvefold matrix of a human spinal signal. Image courtesy of CymaScope.com