AsianScientist (Feb. 25, 2015) – A group of Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students at the University of Hong Kong, under the guidance of the department’s Assistant Professor Dr. Anderson Shum, has successfully “captured” Beethoven’s 5th symphony with a novel water-water system. Their results have been published in Scientific Reports.
The novel liquid system consists of a mixture of two immiscible aqueous phases, the interface of which possesses an ultra-low interfacial tension which is super-sensitive to stimulation of sound waves, i.e. any sound, audible or inaudible, can be “visualized” along the water-water interface.
In this research, the musical notes of Beethoven’s 5th symphony manifested themselves when passing through the aqueous interface of the system. When translated back to music, the accuracy was over 97 percent, which is illustrative of the high sensitivity of the interface in detecting sound waves.
Besides audible sound, the system is capable of detecting sound waves with frequency lower than 20 Hertz, i.e., inaudible to human beings. It is anticipated that making use of this novel water-water system, sounds that are currently unknown to us can be heard. This would not only allow monitoring of infra-sounds generated by windmills or large electronic appliances such as air-conditioners, but also provides an opportunity to understand the communication among huge animals, such as elephants and whales, that communicates through inaudibly pitches with frequencies that can be below 10 Hertz.
Moreover, small fluctuations exist in human body; examples are heart beat and breathing cycle. In Chinese medicine, patterns of pulses signify the patient’s body conditions. The water visualization method could potentially be used to capture precise measurements of these pulses and messages emitted by body organs or tissues transmitted through the bloodstream or body fluid. It will facilitate the development of relevant health technologies such as human body acoustics, or diagnosis of diseases.
The article can be found at: Mak et al. (2014) Musical Interfaces: Visualization and Reconstruction of Music with a Microfluidic Two-Phase Flow.
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Source: University of Hong Kong.
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