What Are Cymatics?
- Josephine Warren
- Nov 4, 2024
- 5 min read
When it comes to sound healing, it's so vastly complex and multi-faceted, that it's hard to know where to start.
Cymatics is the study of visible sound vibration and shows the transformational nature of sound and matter.
When it comes to sound healing, it's so vastly complex and multi-faceted, that it's hard to know where to start.
Cymatics is the study of visible sound vibration and shows the transformational nature of sound and matter.
What are cymatics and why are they relevant to Sound healing?
The human body is made up for 50-75% of water, Water forms the basis of blood, digestive juices, urine and perspiration, and is contained in lean muscle, fat and bones. Water being a strong conductor for sound, imagine how sound affects your ‘inner workings’ and how it can assist in rearranging dissonance = dis-ease into patterns of a natural state of coherence.
Cymatics gives validity to the fact that everything that we perceive as hard objects, including our bodies, are actually continuously vibrating at their own rates. This merges the fields of sound, geometry, light and mathematics into one through the presentation of stunning images created by frequencies of all kinds found in our bodies, in nature and beyond.
So, who did it first?
Leonardo Da Vinci (b 1452 d 1519)
Few will be surprised to learn that the first person to leave a written record of the cymatic phenomenon was none other than Leonardo da Vinci. In the late 1400’s, after observing how the dust motes on his worktable stirred to create shapes when he vibrated the table, he wrote:
“I say that when a table is struck along diverse lines, the dust on it is concentrates in various shapes of hills and small mountains…. The dust which divides itself into various mountains on the struck table descends from the hypotenuse of these hillocks, enters beneath their bases and raises again around the axis of the region under the top of the mountain.” 3
Da Vinci’s recorded observation is profound because in addition to describing the effect of vibration on matter, his thoughts can be translated as a description of life itself. “The dust… descends from the hypotenuse of these hillocks…and raises again….” In a right angle triangle the hypotenuse is given by the square root of 2, which relates to the division of unity in the generative archetype. Two examples in Nature are cellular division following the moment of conception and the division of a plant’s seed. The generation of many from unity is an intrinsic aspect of living systems. Leonardo’s observation of dust under the influence of vibration was, quite literally, a demonstration of the generative archetype that makes all life.
Galileo Galilei (b 1564 d 1642)
Fifty years after Leonardo’s observation, Galileo Galilei discovered a related phenomenon when scraping an iron chisel across a brass plate
July 8, 1680, Robert Hooke, an English scientist, architect, and polymath, who, using a microscope, was the first to visualize a micro-organism, was able to see the nodal patterns associated with the modes of vibration of glass plates as he ran a bow along the edge of a glass plate covered with flour, and saw the nodal patterns emerge.
In the 18th century, German physicist and musician Ernst Chladni demonstrated how vibrations could be used to create striking imagery. By spreading fine sand across the top of a metal plate and running a violin bow alongside, Chladni showed that the sand would settle into distinct patterns, depending on the frequencies of the sound waves produced by the bow.
Those vibrations are associated with standing wave patterns called modes. When the Chladni plate, for instance, vibrates in one of its modes, a pattern appears in the sand on the plate. “What’s happening is, the sand is moving away from the bits [on the plate] where it’s vibrating a lot” says Cox, and it’s settling in places where there are no vibrations (these places are called “nodes”). And, “if you up the frequency, you’ll find the patterns get really complicated,” because more of those nodes occur.
Margaret Watts-Hughes (b 1848 d 1907)
Margaret Watts-Hughes was a Welsh opera singer who experimented with a device she invented in 1885 and named the ‘Eidophone’. Her invention consisted of a wooden resonating chamber with an open end, across which was stretched a rubber membrane, strewn with sand and other media. By singing into a tube that connected with the resonating chamber she was able to create what she termed “Voice Figures.”
Hans Jenny (b 1904 d 1972)
Hans Jenny was a Swiss medical doctor, who coined the word ‘cymatics’ from the Greek word ‘kyma’, meaning wave, to describe the periodic effects that sound and vibration has on matter. Jenny published his first volume Kymatic, in 1967 16 and his second in 1972,17 the year he died. His two volumes are rich sources of cymatic imagery, which he observed and described in great detail, although leaving scientific and mathematical explanations to scientists who would come after him.
Visual artist Jeff Louviere and his partner Vanessa, happened upon the works of Jenny and became inspired to conduct their own experiments to see what sound could look like. The resulting work became Resonantia (Latin for “echo”), a multimedia project centered around 12 images produced by vibrations.
The fact it's called Echo, warms my heart hugely! You can view this art work here: https://www.louviereandvanessa.com/site2018/resonantia.html
THE CYMASCOPE, SEEING SOUND TODAY
The CymaScope is a new type of scientific instrument that makes sound visible. Its development began in 2002, with a prototype that featured a thin, circular, P.V.C. membrane; later we used latex. Fine particulate matter was used as the revealing media. However, it was soon discovered that far greater detail could be obtained by imprinting sonic vibrations on the surface of ultra pure water. The surface tension of water has high flexibility and fast response to imposed vibrations, even with transients as short-lived as a few milliseconds. Therefore, water is able to translate many of the sinusoidal periodicities–in a given sound sample–into physical sinusoidal structures on the water’s surface. Current limits to imprinting sound on water occur in the higher harmonics and are due mainly to there being insufficient energy available in this area of the audio spectrum to cause excursions of the surface tension membrane.
The CymaScope has applications in almost every branch of science simply because vibration underpins all matter. The ability to see such vibrations permits a depth of study previously unavailable to scientists, engineers and researchers. Readers will have seen our list of research topics covering subject areas from Astrophysics to Zoology. Just as great advances in medical science have come about as the result of the microscope, and huge strides have been made in understanding the Universe with the telescope, the CymaScope instrument holds enormous potential to reveal the hidden realm of sound and vibration. Our team recently made a wonderful breakthrough in the field of dolphin language research and in Mereon research, an energy pattern that may lie at the heart of creation. However, as with all scientific instruments it is vital that the relevant maths is developed, enabling predictions to be made and dynamic systems to be modelled.
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Citations from Cymascopre Sound Made Visible.
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