Meara O'Reilly is a composer and artist working on perception and new musical interfaces. This short film, made with Lisa Foti-Straus and posted in 2009, shows her singing at a Chladni plate and holding notes until the sand settles into a figure, then moving to the next note and the next figure.
The idea is simple and surprisingly hard: a plate's modes are at fixed frequencies, so the singer has to find and hold each one precisely, using the sand as feedback. Her website describes the discovery that the voice is not just capable of this but is an intuitive way to do it. The work later became a permanent exhibit, Chladni Singing, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
It is a performance piece rather than a tutorial, and it is one of the few cymatics videos where the sound source is a person rather than a speaker.