While I love Love Hulténs creations I think the article (and headline) does not emphasize enough the origin of these ferrofluid visualizers:
<a href="https://www.burnslap.me/26" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.burnslap.me/26</a>
That's amazing, went down a spiral of other projects too. Crazy stuff.<p>Also reminded me of this ferrofluid clock my buddy built back in the day: <a href="http://www.hellorhei.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.hellorhei.com</a>
It's kind of boring. It makes the same ring-of-fluid shape, or just random little blobs. It's not as representative of the sounds being played as it is just forming around magnetic lines of flux that don't really display the sound. The device construction is what is pretty neat here, but the ferrofluid display is a bit lacking in coolness unless you've never seen ferrofluids reacting to electromagnets before (and maybe I'm jaded because I've seen it plenty of times, and it's practically always the same effect).
Other than looking neat, is there any meaningful information that can be gleaned from an FF display?<p>You can do the obvious with an oscilloscope, but ferrofluid appears as random blobs floating in space. The artist seems to have acknowledged that, as there is a smaller scope in the bottom right of one of their machines.
Ferrofluid can be used for INPUT too, not just output [1].<p>[1] A Reconfigurable Ferromagnetic Input Device <a href="https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=3e57aee97aff017c71efd76b52e8374f8c943910" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...</a>
Don't ferrofluids break down in to the surrounding liquid over time? Or is that mitigated by treating the glass as was mentioned in the bluetooth speaker video from the article?
I would really love to make a ferrofluid visualizer but instead of being part of the signal path, it’s a desk knick-knack with a microphone and wall power… Hmm
That guy really understands how to get timbre out of his synths. Damn what an ear.<p>That's really impressive, and just the beginning. Wait until dozens of people have had a decade to fool around with his base concep. I'd like to see the ferrofluid in 3d. It is naturally a 3d material but his displays are ~2.5d. I'm thinking a big sphere in the middle of the room, kinda like at the end of Netflix's "DARK".
Cool! The "ferrofluid drum synth" video is actually more impressive than the "ferrofluid synth" one, that one just seems to produce the well-known "ferrofluid hedgehog" pattern (<a href="https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e6aeab4f37492b0cfec4473575e4457f-lq" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e6aeab4f37492b0cfec44...</a>), while the drum synth can produce more interesting patterns - same as the Bluetooth speaker (however I wonder how that would handle heavy metal :) ). Now I want one of those!
I think at Disney Worlds Animal Kingdom in the Avatar ride queue they have some pretty cool examples of this. I always wondered how they did it and now I know.
Why are these just blobs?<p>Ferrofluid should be able to visualize all kinds of field lines, no? Why aren't these showing Lissajous-like patterns?
If you’d like to see more regular patterns, I’ve built a browser app for creating and visualizing waveforms: <a href="https://merely.xyz/waves" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://merely.xyz/waves</a><p>It lets you explore the relations between shapes and ratios, less ferro and more Fourier.