Chladni Plate

Tap to bow the plate and watch the sand find its still lines. In the Splash tab, sing to it or play your audio.

In 1787 Ernst Chladni sprinkled sand on a metal plate and drew a violin bow along its edge. The plate shook, and the sand jumped away from the places that moved and gathered on the lines that stayed still, a different picture for each pitch. Those still lines are called nodal lines.

Tap to bow the plate: it hums, and every grain hops and slides until the figure appears. Tap again to stir the sand up. Mode picks the pitch and the pattern; Sand colors picks one color, a few colors, or a flag's colors.

Or sing to it, or open a song: the note it hears rings the plate's nearest mode, and the sand sets off for that figure at once; a new note moves it on, and silence leaves it put. A song's strongest pitch, moved by octaves into the plate's range, plays it as the song goes, and the file stays on your device. This splash uses the classic square-plate model, cos(nπx)·cos(mπy) ± cos(mπx)·cos(nπy) = 0, with a pitch that grows with n² + m².

Made in Splashery. Its code is MIT.