Visualizing Sound Waves With Bubbles And Light Projections

Royal College of Art graduate, Dagny Rewera—co-founder of design-art-science lab, BornAnIdea—could be described as an invisible acoustic investigator. The artist's recent projects focus on how we can find and magnify microscopic sound events before turning them into eye-stunning light shows that put your average screen saver to shame.

Rewera's recent project, aptly titled Invisible Acoustics, continues her process of enlarging tiny sound waves by using a unique set-up, including a series of speakers, a lens, and some soap bubbles. To make small sounds "visible" to the human eye, the experiment uses an automated system where a hoop is dunked into a vat of soap and then it hovers just above a speaker. The sound waves from the speakers cause the soap bubbles to move and vibrate and a magnifying lens is held above the iridescent bubbles and projected on the ceiling, subsequently yielding a DIY, audio-visual light show.

Though it's easy to overlook, everything that moves has a frequency and emits a sound. While "hearing" the vibrations of bubbles is interesting in its own right, translating those tiny motions into an organic visual spectacle, sans-animation or CGI, is fascinating.

We wonder what the bubbles' movements (or dances) might look like if the speaker emitted some four-on-the-floor tech-house. Either way, we hope musicians take notice and collaborate with Rewera for their next tour. Micro-meets-macro audio-visualizations would be certain to blow the minds of any Animal Collective or Phish audience, trust us.

H/T Dezeen

@zachsokol