Chladni Plate

What it is

The classic experiment of Ernst Chladni, as a quietly hypnotic loop: a square brass (or steel, or copper) plate lies under a soft sliding light, clamped by a bolt at its middle. Each note it is shaken at makes the plate move in some places and stand still along lines; the sand on it runs from the moving places to the still ones and draws the figure. Every few seconds the note changes: the plate is shaken hard, the sand is thrown across it and runs again into a new, more or less intricate figure of lines, crossings and lattices, until the loop comes back to the first. Choose the look (brass, steel, copper or glowing neon sand), how many figures a loop holds, how intricate they are, how much sand there is and how big its grains, how wide the bands are, how violently it is thrown, how much the metal shimmers and the seed that picks the figures.

Reuse it in your own idea

• Ambient music backdrop: Brass plate, three figures.
• Physics explainer on resonance: Salt on steel.
• Sound or tech title: Glowing neon sand.

Which part is reusable

src/chladni-plate.js is the ingredient your AI reuses. demo.js is only the example scene around it, and uses the demo harness only for the demo.

Good to know

• The figures are the ideal modes of a plate (cosines), not a simulation of a real clamped plate.
• The sand is drawn as round points a few pixels wide, so very high intricacy with little sand looks sparse: raise the sand with the intricacy.
• The transitions (sand in the air, lines forming) are the costly frames to encode: a loop with more figures or much more sand makes a much larger video.