Visualizing Sound Waves

In the music video "CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music," Nigel Stanford and his band perform a song on drums and keyboards. The sound waves of the instruments are visualized through a series of analog physics experiments. Although the effects look digital, they're not. Everything is captured in camera.

The experiments include a Chladni Plate, Speaker Dish, a Hose Pipe, Ferro Fluid, a Ruben's Tube. In the climactic shot, a stunt double dons a heavy Faraday suit next to a Tesla Coil. He safely attracts a high voltage arc, and jumps to make the arc skip to the ground. Those foregoing links take you to a series of behind-the-scenes videos that show how it's done, or you can read about it here.

Stanford says the video was inspired by the idea of synesthesia. "This got me thinking that it would be cool to make a music video where every time a sound plays, you see a corresponding visual element, " he says. "Many years later, I saw some videos about Cymatics - the science of visualizing audio frequencies, and the idea for the video was born."

Director Shahir Daud and cinematographer Timur Civan restrict the video to a limited palette of grays, and they alternate real time with slow motion.
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Link to the video on Vimeo and YouTube
Cymatics on Wikipedia
Nigel Stanford's new album: Solar Echoes