Visual Beats Creation

How to make your own visual beats:

• What you’ll need:
  • 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
    • Other possibilities: http://www.daytonaudio.com/media/resources/understanding-and-using-dayton-audio-exciters-revised2.pdf
  • 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
  • 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.
• Preforming
  • 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 a symmetric pattern.