A permanent exhibit developed and built in collaboration with the Exploratorium’s Central Gallery.

While Chladni patterns are an 18th century discovery, today they are very often reproduced electronically, with a transducer and a signal generator. Over the course of building and experimenting with the plate, I discovered that it was not only possible to use the human voice to find patterns, but actually quite an intuitive process. After many hours of testing with the public, a custom box, transparent enclosure, and microphone stand were designed and built in collaboration with the Exploratorium.

Early prototypes were built with the same variety of Rolen-Star transducers used in David Tudor’s 1968 Rainforest piece. The current exhibit features a Brüel and Kjaer V408 driver normally used for vibration testing in the auto industry.

The completed exhibit was installed in the Central Gallery in 2013.