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About this tool
Visualize sound, vibration, and Chladni-style nodal patterns with an interactive cymatics simulator.
This cymatics simulator draws Chladni-style nodal figures by scattering thousands of particles across a virtual plate and keeping only the ones that land where the standing wave is near zero — the same thing that makes sand collect into lines on a bowed metal plate. Set a frequency from 50 to 2000 Hz, pick one of six vibration modes (radial, star, mandala, square, hex, spiral) and adjust damping, and the pattern redraws live on canvas. It is built for physics and music teachers, students and sound-art tinkerers who want to see how pitch changes geometry without setting up a signal generator and a plate.
Open Chladni Pattern Simulator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Drag the Frequency slider between 50 and 2000 Hz, or tap a Musical Note button from C3 to B5.
Pick a Vibration Pattern — radial, star, mandala, square, hex or spiral — and move Damping between 0.001 and 0.030.
Raise Particles toward 26,000 while watching the FPS pill, then press Pause to freeze one nodal figure on the canvas.
Twenty-one note buttons from C3 to B5 set the frequency directly, so A4 lands on 440 Hz and A5 on 880 Hz.
Sweeping damping from 0.001 to 0.030 widens or tightens the band of particles that count as sitting on a node.
Particle count runs from 6,000 to 26,000 and a live FPS readout tells you when to back it off.
50 Hz to 2000 Hz on the slider, or any of 21 preset musical notes from C3 (130.81 Hz) to B5 (987.77 Hz). Six starting presets are included at 200, 440, 528, 880, 1200 and 1760 Hz, each paired with a different nodal mode.
No — it is a visual model only, with no audio output and no microphone input. Frequency here is a parameter that sets the wavenumber of the standing wave being drawn, so you can run it silently in a classroom or record the screen without capturing tones.
They are illustrative, not a numerical solution of the plate equation. The figures come from analytic standing-wave expressions per mode, so they behave the right way — more nodal lines at higher frequency, tighter lines at low damping — but they will not match a specific real plate's material, thickness or clamping.
Particles are re-sampled at random every frame, so the nodal lines stay put while the dots filling them refresh. Press Pause to freeze a single frame for a screenshot, or raise the particle count toward 26,000 for a denser, steadier-looking figure.