DOCTOR Hans Jenny (1904-1972) was an obscure medical practitioner and polymath who deserves to be world famous, and one day may be.
He coined the word "cymatics" to describe the patterns he created with various noises, including music - patterns he believed revealed a deep connection between sound - or at least wave vibrations - and life.
I stumbled across Hans Jenny on one of those aimless trawls across the net that rarely, if ever, end up where you think they might.
He filmed some of his experiments and at least some of this historical material is preserved on YouTube.
The road to cymatics has been described as starting with 12th Himalayan "singing bowls", before Galileo in the 17th century scraped a chisel over a piece of brass and noticed "a long row of fine streaks" aligned across it.
Robert Hooke (1635-1703) experimented similarly, before a big step forward by Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladini (1756-1827) - the "father of accoustics" - who created cymatic images using sand on metal plates.
Michael Farraday (1791-1867) and Lord Rayleigh - born John William Strutt (1842-1919), and whose discovery, "Rayleigh scattering", explains why the sky is blue - are further stops along the road to Hans Jenny.
The film on Jenny that caught my eye is titled Bringing Matter To Life With Sound, circa 1970 and narrated by a follower, British medical doctor Peter Guy Manners, who is described as one of the original researchers in "sound healing" and who died in 2009.
Practices such as "sound healing" and "vibrational" therapies take us straight into woo-woo land, but I challenge anyone to watch the Jenny film - or simply look at the images on this page - and deny the resemblance to a plethora of organic forms from cells to shells and spines and trees (seen from above) and tell me there is not some elemental lesson or knowledge to be learned here, if only "straight" science would open its eyes.
I've had a few mystically inclined people insist to me over the years that "all of existence is vibration, all is frequency".
Look up 432 cycles per second - just below our standard tuning of "A = 440 hertz" and you'll see it described as the "frequency of the universe". It is also supposedly the resonance of those Tibetan bowls.
Before we roll our eyes, we should remember that even accepted science is pretty weird from a classical Newtonian viewpoint.
Einstein killed time as an independent entity, putting it and our three physical dimensions together in a broader four-dimensional "space-time".
Then there's the "spooky" science - to use Einstein's description - of the quantum world.
The Master initially rejected this new physics before spending decades in a fruitless search to marry it with the relativistic world.
Quantum mechanics confirm the dual "wave/particle" nature of light and explain how tiny particles can be in two places at once, as initially confirmed by the double-slit light experiments of the 1920s.
What's more, recent "quantum entanglement" experiments have supposedly led to the simultaneous movement of photons as far as 1200 kilometres apart - implying an instantaneous transfer of information that is faster than the speed of light, which is impossible under Einstein's laws.
If these things are "real" then the idea of soundwaves (vibrations) aligning matter into life-like patterns seems downright reasonable in comparison.
Soundwaves are mechanical waves and require a medium - in our case air - to propagate. Hence the saying "in space, no one hears you scream".
Radio waves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet light, x-rays and gamma rays are all electromagnetic radiation, able to travel through the (near) emptiness of space, which contains, on average, 0.3 atoms per cubic metre.
An FM radio station on 90MHz has a wavelength of 3.3 metres.
Visible light is 400 to 700 nanometres (one billionth of a metre).
We see it, but can't hear it. Sound, we can hear, but don't see.
Except thanks to Hans Jenny, we can.
His cymatic images - especially the films showing plates of sand aligned in truly beautiful patterns by harmony, and collapsing into chaos when exposed to dischord, surely hint at an underlying organisation in nature - and not just on earth, but in the alignment of galaxies, the entire cosmos - that we are only dimly aware of in modern times.
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We like the Greeks for developing democracy but we tend to dismiss the importance of their Platonic shapes and the associated "sacred geometry" of the ancients (although maybe Masonic America didn't with The Pentagon ...).
I think it's time, though, to look at these ideas again.
I've only explored a few of the roads taken by those who've embraced Hans Jenny's work, and taken it to heart.
What I do know, though, is that he was a visionary, and that through him we can literally "see what we hear".
All I need now is a brass plate, some sand and a few recordings of Scotty and Albo.
Now there's an idea ...
