The best thing about science is that to the uninitiated, it can look like magic

Nigel Stanford from my home town of Wellington, New Zealand, presents Cymatics. It’s spectacular.

thank you 🙂 it was a lot of work, I’m glad that people like it

His double album is called Solar Echoes.

From Nigel’s blog:

Nigel Stanford

The most unusual part of making Cymatics was the fact that the music was written after the video was filmed.

In 1999 I watched a documentary on ‘Synesthesia‘ – a disorder that effects the audio and visual functions of the brain. People with the disorder hear a sound when they see bright colors, or see a color when they hear various sounds. I don’t have it (I don’t think), but I have always felt that bass frequencies are red, and treble frequencies are white.

This got me thinking that it would be cool to make a music video where every time a sound plays, you see a corresponding visual element. Many years later, I saw some videos about Cymatics – the science of visualizing audio frequencies, and the idea for the video was born.

In 2013, I approached my friend Shahir Daud, a talented film director working in New York, and asked him if he was interested in collaborating on the video with me. I don’t think he really knew what I was talking about, but happily he said yes, and in July 2013 we started researching the experiments and buying bits and pieces online.

Read more here.

Cinematographer Timur Civan also discusses filming the video here.