string in motion turning music inside out

This fascinated me completely, especially as a string player,
despite looking dangerously similar the old Mac screen savers and iTunes visualizers
Imagine what these string vibrations would look like visually
for an entire Mahler symphony or an illustration of Baroque counterpoint!

What would it be like to be a string that made music? Not anything simple, like a guitar string or a cello string, but a magical string, a sine curve that's taut then loose, that doubles then doubles again, that sheds then dissolves into showers of notes — a flaming, sighing, looping, dissolving string. Curious?

That's what we've got here, from New York's School of Visual Arts grad student Daniel Sierra. This is his masters' thesis. This is music as you might imagine it in a magical laboratory under a magical microscope. Really close in.





via one of my favorites, Krulwich Wonders on {npr}