Pyro Board Breathes Fiery Life Into Music

What's This?

By Brian Koerber2014-04-22 22:30:43 UTC

Stand back, things are about to get heated.

A team of Danish physics demonstrators created this Pyro Board, which can visually represent sound waves on a 2D plane with fire.

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The concept of the board stems from a Rubens' tube, which is an antique physics tools used to visually demonstrate what a standing wave looks like. This wave that stands in a constant stationary position consists of nodes, or low points, and anti-nodes, or high points.

The waves are represented on the perforated tube when flammable gas is pumped through one end of the tube and a sound wave through the other via a speaker.

The Pyro Board takes this same idea of a Rubens' tube, but flattens the perforated tube onto a plane, consisting of 2,500 separate holes.

TL;DR: If you swap the constant frequency for something more complex, such as music, the flames dance around to the beat. The music's frequencies and amplitudes are portrayed with different flames in color and size, resulting in one insanely cool project at the science fair.

This can also be applied to the original Rubens' tube, as shown in the video below.

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Topics: fire, Music, physics, pyro board, rubens tube, Videos, viral video, Watercooler

Video: YouTube, veritasium