CHLADNI PLATE
Photograph by Ed Troxell
BEAUTIFUL ACOUSTICS
Use a broken speaker, bits of wire, and tape to prepare a coneless voice coil driver, then use it to generate standing waves on a sheet of metal, making sound visible. Magic!
My knowledgeable friend Robin once said that you don’t need to worry about having too big an audio amplifier, because speakers are usually damaged by under-powered amps working too hard and clipping the signal, creating rough square waves with too much power. I learned that this is true when I melted a speaker’s coil by running a strong 20Hz signal through it, to drive a vortex cannon (MAKE, Volume 15, ...
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