Music, as sensed by humans is a delicate tracery of audible frequencies that harmonise with each other and generally please our emotions. What is not commonly known, but is clearly demonstrated in these videos, is that music has the seemingly magical power to create form from formlessness. MusicMadeVisible is still under development but an exciting future lies ahead when all music can be described to the visual realm, with the aid of the CymaScope instrument. This new technology is likely to be of great assistance to profoundly deaf people and those with other life challenges.

This effect can be seen during the moments of transition as Yantara changes his vocal pitch during progress of the melody. The color was added as an experiment in which each musical note was allocated with a specific color.

In collaboration with Japanese vocalist, Yantara Jiro, we imaged a short vocal melody to assess how quickly the CymaScope's water membrane is able to follow changes in the pitch of musical sounds. The water has a natural hysteresis, thus, it takes a finite time for the water molecules to take up new wavelet placements in response to a new set of imposed frequencies.

The Halo Drum features a highly distinctive mix of harmonics and the sustain of each note, particularly the C3, is several seconds in duration, allowing the harmonics to be rendered visible.

In collaboration with musician, Matthew Calder, we imaged a short Halo Drum melody as part of our ongoing development of MusicMadeVisible in which the complex harmonic structures within music are made visible in real time video mode on the CymaScope instrument. No color was added to the video.

12 Piano notes made visible for the first time

Shannon Novak, a New Zealand-born fine artist, commissioned us to image 12 piano notes as inspiration for a series of 12 musical canvases. We decided to image the notes in video mode because when we observed the 'A1' note we discovered, surprisingly, that the energy envelope changes over time as the string's harmonics mix in the piano's wooden bridge. Instead of the envelope being fairly stable, as we had imagined, the harmonics actually cause the CymaGlyphs to be wonderfully dynamic. Our ears can easily detect the changes in the harmonics and the CymaScope now reveals them--probably a first in acoustic physics.



Capturing the dynamics was only possible with HD video but taming the dynamics of the piano's first strike, followed by the short plateau and long decay phase, was tricky.

We achieved the result with the help of a professional audio compressor operating in real time.

Shannon was delighted with the results. He commented:

"I have always been fascinated with the translation of that which is invisible, into something visible that individuals can relate to, in particular, the representation of sound through colour and geometric form. I saw the use of cymatic technology as one method of such representation and a unique and compelling way of educating individuals about the link between sound, colour, and geometric form".

Piano notes made visible on the CymaScope

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

The piano notes were painstakingly recorded by Evy King and then fed into the CymaScope one by one

and the results recorded in high definition video.