Ripple - feeling music and cymatics

I saw this a while back in some tech/design magazine and was reminded again how cool this is seeing it on Pintrest today. Just love the simplicity in the design and concept. The speaker is called the Ripple and was designed by Jackson McConnell for the hearing impaired.

These remind me of a sort of 3D interpretation of Chladni patterns that you can get by putting sand on vibrating surfaces and seeing how it piles up. These can also make some pretty cool looking patterns (there are some good examples here) like the ones made by Hans Jenny below:

These are all variations of applications of our friend the Bessel function, which can be used to represent deformations of a 2D surface.

Taking this further in the field of cymatics there's a whole lot of interesting 2D and 3D patterns that can be made with different materials and vibrations. It gets even more funky for non-Newtonian materials like cornstarch (check this out on Make, Instructables or YouTube).