Cymatics: Sound Goes Visual

"By 1967 the vaguely mystical idea of vibes, informed by a heady cocktail of drug usage, new science and radical psychology, had entered the language"

Seeing sounds

In 1787, a German physicist and musician named Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni published a scientific paper demonstrating his newly discovered method for rendering sound visible to the naked eye. By spreading a layer of sand on a flat metal plate, then sounding the metal with a violin bow, he could show the formation of regular patterns as they flowed through the material. “The sand is thrown off from the vibrating portions of the surface, often with considerable violence,” he wrote. “Whereas it remains at rest on the places where there is no motion.”

These experiments advanced our scientific knowledge of acoustic vibration, but other than Chaldni’s observation that the results were striking, the effect was not treated as aesthetic in its own right. In the Victorian era, John Tyndall, another important researcher into the physics of sound, went so far as to describe Chladni’s patterns as beautiful, but it was Hans Jenny who finally presented visual documents of these vibrations in a form that crossed boundaries between science and art.

In Cymatics, published in 1967, Jenny revealed the physical effects of amplified electronic sound on liquids, powders and gases with breathtakingly beautiful close-up photography. Appropriately for the time, the patterns seemed psychedelic, hallucinatory, like abstract art (particularly the light shows projected on bands like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine). Though dreamlike, reminiscent of amorphous creatures or the terrifying landscapes of some alien planet, they also unveiled at a microscopic level what musicians have always known: sound may be invisible and immaterial but its passage through the air, its impact on solid bodies including the human body, can be heard and visualised as forms.

Jenny was a doctor and a scientist but his approach to the documentation of these phenomena was enhanced by his abilities as a painter and pianist. Born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1904, he was fascinated by periodicity and forms in nature. “He understood sound as a creative power,” wrote Volkfried Schuster, a member of the Schwingungsinstitut Hans Jenny in the 1970s. “He wanted to realise a phenomenology of the world of vibrations and their effects on different materials.” This new science was called ‘Cymatics’, derived from the Greek word kyma, which means wave. Cymatics was a serious programme of scientific research, but it also caught the zeitgeist. ‘Good Vibrations’ by The Beach Boys had been a worldwide hit at the end of 1966, and by 1967 the vaguely mystical idea of vibes, informed by a heady cocktail of drug usage, new science and radical psychology, had entered the language.

But Jenny also had his mystical side, though its roots went back further than the hippies. As a young man he taught science at the Rudolf Steiner School in Zurich, and followed Steiner’s Anthroposophical teaching throughout his life. Another influential book, Theodor Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos, published by Rudolf Steiner Press in 1965, featured Hans Jenny’s photographs alongside other images of flowing forms visible in water and air. The underlying idea driving all this

" The underlying idea driving all this research was that the universe is composed of unseen forces"

research was that the universe is composed of unseen forces. Once revealed they show a universality of forms and systems that are consistent from the microscopic level right through to human movement, speech and many expressions of culture from the choreography of dance through to patterns found carved into stone in Bronze Age temples.

Jenny also experimented with colour and light for the theatre, including productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In many cases, the images in Cymatics possess an innate theatricality – like weird stage sets, they expose the dramas enacted by life forms at all levels of phenomena. With his background as family doctor, artist, biologist and mystic, Jenny was inevitably drawn to the idea that this rhythmic undercurrent of life was at the heart of a unifying view of the cosmos. He described this as triadic: configuration, wave and power. The strength of Cymatics, however, is its focus on observable phenomena. Jenny ends the book with more speculative conclusions for the future. “Rhythms in history,” he wrote. “Resonances, interferences, standing and travelling waves in human relations; the wave-like rise and fall of memories, thoughts and emotions in a periodic manner; poetry and music – all these are themes which have been illuminated by this concept of the basic triadic phenomenonduring our conversations with numerous personalities.