Sand, sound, and standing waves.
A pocket Chladni plate — the centuries-old physics demo where sand on a vibrating plate flees the shaking regions and gathers along invisible still lines, drawing eerily symmetric figures. ~9,000 grains, simulated in real time.
Free · No ads · No accounts · No trackingWhat it does
Nobody draws the lines. Each grain is kicked harder where the plate shakes more, so the swarm settles onto the calm lines on its own — an emergent picture of a standing wave.
Thousands of grains run through the actual standing-wave field every frame — not a pre-baked animation.
Tap the plate to shuffle to a new figure and watch the sand stampede into place. Long-press for a pure-visual view.
Choose the pattern numbers, and push the plate harder or softer for razor-sharp or shimmering lines.
Each pattern has a frequency. Turn sound on to hear the tone that produces what you see.
Everything is computed on your device. No network, no servers, nothing to sign up for.
No analytics, no tracking, no accounts. Your activity never leaves your phone.
In motion
The science
Driven at a resonant frequency, a square plate bulges and dips in a fixed standing-wave pattern. Sand can't rest where the plate shakes, so it slides toward the nodal lines where the surface barely moves. Those lines follow:
Each integer pair (m, n) carves out a completely different figure. Cymatic doesn't fake them — it runs the grains through the real field and lets the picture emerge.
Cymatic has no analytics, no trackers, no accounts, and makes no network requests. Nothing you do in the app ever leaves your device.
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