Nigel John Stanford
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2023
5:53 · 55M views · Nov 12, 2014
Nigel Stanford's music video Cymatics, in which real science experiments, such as Chladni plates, ferrofluid and water, visualize the audio.
Mentioned as a striking example of sound producing physical effects and a favorite among his videos.
3 comments from Hacker News
I quite like this one: [LINK] AUTOMATICA - Robots Vs. Music - Nigel Stanford More industrial robot arm choreography and creative film making, but with some fun mindless destruction too. (And if you like that, another one of his I like is tghis: this video )
Thanks! With the caveat that I profoundly lack depth on both, and am a bit artsy craftsy in my intuitions, I did buy the Maths module precisely because it was an analog computer. The intent was to create some generative music, and seeing if I could use it to create 1/f noise, and exploring self-similarity using a musical ear instead of in code. Still working on it. When you look at what you can do with magnets hooked to a synth with a ferrofluid, e.g. this video , the sound and your ear helps to develop an sense for what kinds of waves can be used to yield physical effects. If you can functionally suspend and maipulate a ferrofluid with waves, there are likely analogies to laser pulses and electrons for quantum computing. Waves gonna wave, etc. The other piece that grabbed me recently was "analog fractals," ( [LINK] + that rabbit hole) where if you can get those artifacts instantaneously as the effect of physical feedback instead of rendering them computationally, there are likely faster functional approaches to a lot of other problems, only a subset of which we use ASICs and FPGAs to implement today. It's speculative based on laughably incomplete understandings on my part, but that's hacking.
Related: What is Oscilloscope Music and how do you display it on your oscilloscope? [LINK] Jerobeam Fenderson's Oscilloscope Music YouTube Channel [LINK] Intuitively, there seems to be a relationship between Oscilloscope Music and Cymatics: CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music - Nigel Stanford this video (Also, there's an implied 2D to 3D mapping from the Oscilloscope experiments...)