Just recently, we were very impressed with Fabian Oefner's brilliant watercolor mosaics, and today, we focus on another one of his remarkably inspiring scientific experiments. Dancing Colors is a project where Oefner turns sound waves into visible sculptures and he says, “The idea of the series is to build a bridge between the acoustical and the visual world.”
To set up the project, Oefner wraps a very thin piece of plastic on top of a speaker and places salt, colored with pigments, on top. When the speaker begins to vibrate with music, the plastic vibrates and these odd looking sculptures form for just a fraction of a second. By connecting a microphone to the flash trigger, Oefner is able to capture these very brief moments where sound colorfully dances along the surface of the speaker.
The process is very time-consuming and messy, and Oefner he has to clean up the set after each photograph! But, the artist doesn't seem to mind the mess since the experimental process results in these vibrant visual delights.
