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Video11 Mar 2013Light & strobesRigs & DIY

Why water seems to freeze in brusspup's speaker and hose trick

The famous water-and-sound video is a camera effect: a hose vibrated at a speaker's frequency, filmed at 24 frames per second.

Watch on YouTube ↗brusspup · brusspup · 2 min

This is the second version of one of the most-shared water and sound videos on YouTube. A soft rubber hose is taped to a powered speaker so the water stream is shaken at the tone frequency, and a camera running at 24 frames per second captures the stream as a frozen zigzag or as beads that appear to crawl upwards.

The description is unusually honest about what is going on. The effect cannot be seen with the naked eye; it only works through the camera, because the frame rate and the vibration frequency are matched. It also notes that a strobe light would make the same thing visible to the eye directly. That is exactly the stroboscopic principle our own phased-strobe rigs rely on, and this video is a neat demonstration of it with almost no equipment.

It is worth being clear with visitors that this is not sound sculpting water into a standing shape. It is aliasing, and it is still a lovely trick.

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