A Brief History of Cymatics

The provenance of Cymatics can be traced back at least 1000 years to African tribes who used the taut skin of drums sprinkled with small grains to divine future events. 3 The drum is one of oldest known musical instruments 4 and the effects of sand on a vibrating drumhead have probably been known for millennia.

Leonardo Da Vinci (b 1452 d 1519) noticed that vibrating a wooden table on which dust lay created various shapes. 'I say then 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. The dust descends from the hypotenuse of these hillocks, enters beneath their base and raises itself again around the axis of the point of the hillock.'

Galileo Galilei (b 1564 d 1642) described scraping a brass plate with a chisel and noticed a 'long row of fine streaks, parallel and equidistant from one another,' 6 presumably caused by the brass filings dancing on the surface of the plate and finding safe haven in a series of parallel nodal striations.

John Stuart Reid (b 1948) is an acoustics engineer who carried out cymatics research in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Egypt in 1997. Reid published his research results in Egyptian Sonics 17 containing photographs of the cymatic patterns that formed on a PVC membrane he stretched over the sarcophagus. The experiment was designed to study the resonant behaviour of the granite from which the sarcophagus is fashioned. Since many of the images strongly resemble ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs Reid postulated that the inherent resonances of granite, when radiated as a complex sound field during crafting of the stone, might have influenced the development of hieroglyphic writing.

Please visit our History section for more in depth information on the history of Cymatics