Home    Equipment and Setup    Photo Journal    More Pictures

    Music, physics, and art? How can the three be connected? It may seem that there is no connection between the science of physics and the aesthetically pleasing music or art. However, by combining a simple snare drum, holepunch bits, physics, and some knowledge about high speeding imaging, we were able to create artistic pictures using a snare drum.

    Where to begin first? Well, we knew we not only wanted to do a systematic study in an area, but we wanted to have fun and produce beautiful pictures while we were doing it. After making a decision to play with the behavior of drums and use them to make our beautiful pictures we stood back and recalled our wonderful physics knowledge from last year. When a drum is hit it vibrates. If we imagined just looking at the drumhead at a cut off view from the side, we might see a standing wave. But, what is a wave, let alone a standing wave? Well, from reaching into our data bank of physics knowledge we know that a wave is described as a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location. So hitting the drum disturbs the drumhead and causes our helpful wave.

    One characteristic of every standing wave pattern is that there are points along the wave that appear to be standing still. These points, sometimes described as points of no displacement (change in position), are referred to as nodes. There are other points along the wave that undergo vibrations between a large positive and large negative displacement (positions). These are the points that undergo the maximum displacement (change in position) during each vibrational cycle of the standing wave. In a sense, these points are the opposite of nodes, and so they are called antinodes.  We were able to use this knowledge to know that the vibrating antinodes on the drumhead, when hit, would cause our holepunch pieces to pop up. Of course we knew on the antinodes the pieces would jump at their highest, and we knew that the place were we hit it initially would have the highest jumping bits. And after various placements of paper bits we were able to find places on the drumhead with no movement (the nodes.)

    But physics didn’t just stop there. We knew from physics a little bit about light.We knew that if we wanted to make a pretty rainbow picture that all the colors would combine and give us overall white light. This helped us be artistic and produce our best pictures. So physics, music and art can be connected and here’s how….

To produce aesthetically pleasing pictures using known physics and the vibrations of a drumhead hit with a drumstick.

We know that drums produce vibrations when hit. The drum’s vibrations have nodes (places where the drum head is not moving) and antinodes (places where the vibration is strongest). The strongest antinode would be where the drumstick hits the drum. We used this to produce wedge-shaped and parabola-shaped hole punch images. We accidentally discovered a node when a pile of hole punch bits in that spot did not move. When we tried to find where other nodes were on the drum using cork dust (the dust would collect over the nodes), we discovered that the drum has perhaps 20 randomly distributed nodes. This may be true or due to our rather unscientific method of testing – we tried to hit the drum around 75 times with the same strength in the same place, but it was difficult to be consistent.