Visual Beats Creation

What You'll Need:

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• Exciter
  • The power must be at least 15W RMS in order to get some shapes. We went with 25W RMS and that restricted us to the last creatable pattern at 528Hz
• Amplifier
  • A good rule of thumb is to buy one that is 1.5x the RMS power of your speaker
• Frequency Generator
• Plate
  • The thickness, size, and material of the plate will have an impact on what sort of shapes you will be able to find
  • Materials such as: Aluminum, Mylar, Plexiglas, Phenolic Plastic, Corrugated Plastic/Cardboard work well
    • Here is a link for other possibilities.
• Particle-like Medium
  • You will need the size of the particles to be evenly distributed. For example, Salt isn’t efficient as the crystal pieces can come in a variety of sizes.

Setting Up:

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• One of the challenges will be the balancing and flexibility of the plate.
• We suggest screwing the center of your plate to the exciter for best performance.
• You will also need to consider a strong base for your exciter to be held up with
  • We used a tiny screw and screwed that between a hole in a black pole we had. Since this was the only thing supporting the speaker upright, it eventually wore out and unscrewed.

Performing:

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• Once you have the plate well balanced and held tightly, you are ready to play some frequencies and search for visuals.
• Experiment around different frequencies to find some patterns. As you go higher in frequency, you will notice that the patterns get more complicated.
• Make sure to evenly spread out your medium onto the plate, dense regions will interfere with producing a visibly symmetric pattern.