Cymatics · field register

Chladni Fields

A vibrating plate scattered with sand sorts itself into figures — the sand settling wherever the plate holds still. This runs that idea backwards. Famous crop formations, and the ancient figures they echo, are read as sound: the geometry sets a fundamental and a stack of partials, and beside each one is the pattern that frequency would raise in sand on Ernst Chladni's plate. Or skip the field entirely and raise your own — by tone, or by voice.

Crop formations

Ancient figures · and your own

Playback

stopped · press Play

Source

Tone freq

220

Smoothing

0.86

Line sharp

Gain

2.2

Sustain

Voice

Level

Sing low → big lazy loops. Go up top → fine filigree. Bright lines are nodes — where the sand settles. Fifteen plate modes on a 160² grid; the microphone is analysed in your browser and never recorded.

Formation · aerial

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—Fundamental · Hz

Symmetry: —
Span: —
Plate mode: —

Chladni plate · nodal lines

Partial stack

harmonics of the fundamental · lit bars fall on multiples of the symmetry

1stpartial number →14th

How the translation works

Five readings off one drawing

Span → pitch.The figure's overall size sets the fundamental. A wider mark in the crop sounds lower, the way a longer string or a larger plate does; a hand-sized amulet rings up in a higher register than any field.
Symmetry → harmony.N-fold rotational symmetry lifts the Nth partial and its multiples — the same partials a plate divides into when it carries N nodal diameters.
Rings → timbre.Concentric bands in the design push energy higher or lower in the partial stack, giving each figure its colour. Where a figure encodes numbers — the digits of π, the Horus-eye fractions — those numbers are used as the partial amplitudes directly.
Lay → attack.A swept, spiral lay rolls the upper partials off gently and warm; a hard geometric lay keeps them bright and present.
Then the plate.The fundamental is fed to a square-plate Chladni model. The nodal lines it draws are the still places — where the sand would gather.

Raise your own. Pick Your own tone at the end of the strip. Then the plate stops following a figure and follows sound: fifteen plate modes are each weighted by how much of the live spectrum falls at their frequency, and the sand settles on whatever the mix holds still. Drag the tone slider and play, or use the microphone and sing — low notes make big lazy loops, high notes fine filigree. On the left, the formation your tone would lay is drawn from the loudest mode.

Dossier

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Location: —
Reported: —
Form: —
Span (used): —