Sound Mirrors

Before radar was invented to detect enemy airforces, acoustic mirrors were build around the coasts of Great Britain to provide an early warning system. The huge concrete constructions can be found in Denge and on the Dungeness peninsula among others, for the latter check the video. There has been other quite curious approaches in history [...]

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Sea Organ

There is a small group of musical instruments that operate without human interaction, the aeolian harp or wind chimes are commonly known as such unintentional sound producers.The Sea organ based in Zadar, Croatia, is another example: a system of polyethylene tubes situated underneath white marble steps are “played” by the incoming waves of the sea shore [...]

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Suitcases Play Music

Jose Angel Olivares and Matthew Young had the idea of creating rhytmic patterns with roller luggage pulled across a specially manufactured surface as we encounter at airports for instance (picture me rollin’). “Tones are produced as the wheels of the roller luggage encounter different textures, and these tones will be arranged in a way to create [...]

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Odd Sympathy

Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens observed 1673 that two pendulums mounted on the same beam will come to swing in perfectly opposite directions, an observation he referred to as odd sympathy which in modern times is known as resonance. The tendency of two pendulums to synchronize, or asynchronize, is also refered to as the lock-in-effect. [...]

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Japan’s Melody Roads Play Music as You Drive

A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of “melody roads“, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel. The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit [...]

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The Noisy Neighbors Who Live Underwater

New York Times reports that in Florida the mating calls of a fish species called black drum resonated through the homes of retirees in Cape Coral, leading to the neighbors to push the City Council to eliminate the noise. Nobody would believe that the source of the noise reverbaration was fish. ”For most fish, the sonic [...]

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Bugs in a Box

In 2005 I found some old engravings from the 1870s travels of a german scientist by the name of Peters to Madagascar that feature several bug species of the island. As I was searching for a nice framing I ran into a shop that provides educational material for schools, apart from other things the owner [...]

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