Revising Our Final Attempt

To better see the waves, we added a little vinegar to the substance for color. Now, we started to get amazing, not to mention beautiful, results.

Our first standing wave with this new colored concoction came at about 58 hz, slightly below our prediction of 60 hz that we had seen in water. It sounds more like shaking than a low frequency, but you can actually see the pulsing within the liquid. While the liquid did not produce perfectly static waves, the video illustrates that there must have been a resonant frequency that had been struck. One important thing to remember is that our tupperware and speaker were both slightly slanted, the tupperware being bent and the speaker having been taken out of its housing. I suspect that, had we possessed a level with which to perfectly balance our vibrating medium, the results could have been even more impressive.

Other frequencies, all below 120 hz, produced astounding results. You can hear our “oohs” and “aahs” in the accompanying video.
At about 14 seconds, you can see the waves emmerge as we take the frequency down for a second, and then bring it back up the resonant frequency. Pretty astounding.

So where do we go with this? There are an abundance of different mediums to try. It would be fun to do a lot more with this. Our equipment was, for the most part, improvised toys. Using professional equipment (that might actually be flat, how luxurious) I imagine that we could get even cooler results.
One major regret that both of us had was that we only tried sine waves. Square waves and triangle waves would have been really interesting, especially when using liquids. Sine waves, after all, seem a little too friendly with liquid, both being so smooth and curvy.
We encourage all who read this and see our results using rather pathetic means to try and do better. Seriously. There isn't necessarily something significant left to learn in cymatics, but how can you look at this without wanting to get your own results? Surely you could do better.