singing sands

best new artist of the year

This sound has been the source of legends for centuries.  Per New Scientist, the secret's been unlocked:

Sand dunes in certain parts of the world are notorious for the noises they make as sand avalanches down their sides. Some emit low powerful booms, others sound like drum rolls or galloping horses, and some are even tuneful. These dune songs have been reported to last for up to 15 minutes and can sound as loud as a low-flying aeroplane. Physicists know it is the avalanches that set the grains humming, but the precise mechanism has remained controversial. 

Stéphane Douady ...  and his colleagues shipped sand from Moroccan singing dunes back to his lab to investigate. They found that they could play notes by pushing the sand by hand, or with a metal handle. That put to rest one theory that the noise was the result of the entire dune resonating.

So Douady and his team turned sand into a kind of musical instrument:

... Douady can manipulate these frequencies, by setting various quantities of the grains tumbling with a mechanical motor and changing their velocity. "We make different notes that are expressive and emotional," he says.

"It's fantastic, really beautiful," says Hans Herrmann, a sand dune expert at Stuttgart University in Germany.

Granted, there are Germans who think that Kraftwerk's music is beautiful and expressive.  But Douady's group is planning to release a CD - and I'm planning to buy it.

Comments

[jayinbmore]

Hey! Why you gotta pick on Kraftwerk? For one thing, it's not just Germans who think their music is beautiful and expressive. I will be happy to provide you a list of plenty of non-Teutons - including me - who think their music has both qualities.

[RJ Eskow]

Yeah, they're cool. No offense ...

[jayinbmore]

Oh, none taken. I just get defensive about my faves, you know?