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Incredible slow-motion photography reveals the hallucinatory beauty of sound in water - and whiskeyhttps://www.businessinsider.in/miscellaneous/incredible-slow-motion-photography-reveals-the-hallucinatory-beauty-of-sound-in-water-and-whiskey/slidelist/64343728.cms2018-05-27T20:02:36+05:30

Incredible slow-motion photography reveals the hallucinatory beauty of sound in water - and whiskey

May 27, 2018, 20:02 IST

Gledhill started experimenting with standard macro-photography camera gear. He took images of a roughly one-inch-wide, quarter-inch-deep dish of water vibrated by a speaker.

The camera peers down on the dish through a an LED light ring, which evenly illuminates the liquid in the dish. (In this case, malt whiskey.) The light ring is visible in a reflection at the center of this image.

Here's a photo of Gledhill's cymascope rig at his home.

By changing the colors of the LEDs and the frequency of sound, he can produce a diverse array of patterns as sound waves bounce off the sides of the dish, repeatedly cycling back and forth.

"They're highly complex, and the phenomenon creates huge ranges of patterns," Gledhill said. Higher frequencies result in more intricate ripples in the water that distort and reflect the LED light in wild ways.

Frequencies toward the lower range of human hearing, at around 20 Hertz (cycles per second), produce larger patterns. Gledhill thinks this one resembles an alien head.

And he thinks this pattern — recorded in a mix of 90% rubbing alcohol and 10% water — looks somewhat like sheep.

This one looks a bit like a wormhole in space.

At certain frequencies, the waves resonate perfectly to create Faraday or standing waves. Basically, the waves line up so well, the liquid takes on a pattern that doesn't appear to move.

Gledhill eventually tried different containers for liquids, including plastic refrigerator-magnet letters with hollow backs.

The word "cymatics" is cleverly spelled out here in several images of refrigerator magnets. The term is derived from the Greek word for wave. It describes any visible repeating wave pattern through a medium — water in this case.

Gledhill also used square dishes to create cymatic images. This one became a music album cover.

He eventually threw glass microbeads into the water to see what'd happen. That created a chaos of cymatic patterns.

His work eventually caught the eyes of designers at the fashion collective Threeasfour. Epson (of computer printer fame) paid the artists to design a clothing line with a new fabric-coloring process.

Threeasfour picked Gledhill's hallucinatory, fractal-like images as their muse for the project. "We're obsessed with geometry. That's how we design," Gabriel Asfour, a designer behind the collection, said during a panel in February.

This image shows a full frame-by-frame sequence of one period of oscillations. It was taken with a camera that's capable of recording up to 1 million frames per second.

Gledhill says his experiments in photography are a hobby, and that he's always looking to collaborate on interesting projects. "That's one of my biggest drivers for sharing my work," he said.

Watch Gledhill's full video cut of different cymatic patterns below.

Gledhill says his experiments in photography are a hobby, and that he's always looking to collaborate on interesting projects. "That's one of my biggest drivers for sharing my work," he said.

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