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Showing posts from November, 2012

Singer, Scientist and the Visible Energy of Sound

By Jagpreet Luthra She was a singer. As she practiced a particular tune, she would experience a 'trance-like' mental state and see a snake-like form. This connection between a particular tune, her mental state and the sudden appearance of a snake-like form foxed her but also prompted her to experiment. In order to test this experience, she spread out sand particles in that area and again started singing that tune. When she inspected the sand particles she actually saw that a snake-like form had come into being. She was the famous British-Welsh singer Mrs. Watts Hughes, who later went on to invent the eidophone in 1885, a device that translated the vibrations of her voice into patterns on a glycerin-coated elastic membrane. Later, a Swiss medical doctor and scientist, Hans Jenny who studied visual sound intensively, published his first volume Kymatik in 1967 and his second in 1972, the year he died. Jenny coined the word Kymatik ('cymatic' in English) from t