What it takes to re-create Rings of Power title sequence with Chladni figures
Steve Mould re-created The Rings of Power title sequence using patterns produced by vibrating square plates.
The first time I saw the opening credits for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I thought the patterns looked remarkably like so-called "Chladni figures": vibrational patterns that form when one scatters sand on a vibrating plate. It seems I was not the only one. British science communicator and YouTube star Steve Mould got so many comments from viewers about the similarities that he decided to test that hypothesis-by re-creating the title sequence with his own vibration-generated patterns. He documents the journey, and the associated science, in the video above. The final re-created title sequence starts at the 10:55 mark.
The phenomenon is technically known as cymatics. In 1680, Robert Hooke experimented with running a bow along glass plates covered in flour to induce vibrations and noted the telltale nodal patterns that formed in the flour. "A rigid plate will have a set of natural resonance frequencies just like a string, and when the plate is excited at one of these frequencies, it will form a standing wave with fixed nodes," University of North Carolina physicist Greg Gbur wrote back in 2013. "These nodes will form lines on the plate, in contrast to points on the string." The flour on the plate made those nodal lines visible.
The 18th-century German physicist and musician Ernest Chladni perfected the method 100 years later when he repeated Hooke's pioneering experiments with circular plates, even demonstrating the effect before Napoleon. The various shapes or patterns created by resonance frequencies are known as "Chladni figures" in his honor. Chladni even came up with a mathematical formula to predict which patterns would form. The higher the rate of oscillation, the more complex those figures will be. Similar methods are still used when designing acoustic instruments: violins, guitars, and cellos, for example.