Music you can watch

OK, so you thought you could only hear music? Or maybe, feel it? Kim Craig and Erin Callanan found out what happens when you mix cornflour, water, and a massive speaker stack.

When scientists get bored, they do strange things. Like mixing cornflour with water and putting it on a speaker, testing different sound frequencies and seeing what happens. Actually, that’s exactly what they did, except it wasn’t just a random experiment because a cornflour and water mix is a well-known example of a Non-Newtonian fluid.

In layman’s terms, the particles in a Newtonian fluid (almost anything, like water) move faster the more pressure put on it making it less viscous. A Non-Newtonian fluid (like custard and ketchup) behaves in an opposite way to this and actually becomes solid for a short space of time when a pulse goes through it. Cornflour particularly does this due to the polymer structure of it – which, if you get microscopic, looks like a long chain glucose polymer or starch. When you touch the fluid slowly, the long strands slide past each other easily, but when you use enough force and the fluid changes into a solid until the force is removed.

This happens particularly well when the deep beat of a tune created random shapes, where the cornflour mix has not yet returned to its original state, before a new pulse of sound waves is passed through it. Abrupt changes in the type and length of waves causing the solidification and can cause the fluid to change into interesting and amusing shapes, whereas the lack of sound causes the fluid to return to its liquid state.

If you use a strong enough force on the speaker, you can bounce the entire mass of cornflour off the cone, but as soon as it leaves the surface it becomes a liquid again. Which might be messy.

See what happens to your Non-Newtonian fluids when you subject them to these tunes.  

Dubstep: Coki ‘Revolution’
Heavy Metal: Motorhead ‘Ace Of Spades’