The Tibetan Singing Bowl, a musical instrument that came from ancient Tibet, revealed its secrets to scientists. Physicists understood what bowls sound like and what they do with water
Tibetan bowls, an ancient musical instrument used in Asia for religious rituals and meditation, has attracted the attention of American scholars. Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have figured out how instruments sound and how they interact with water.
Typically, singing bowls are made from a bronze alloy that includes copper, tin, zinc, iron, silver, gold, and nickel. Driving along the edge of the bowl with a wooden leather-covered pestle, the musician extracts from the bowl thick sounds filled with overtones. Scientists decided to use these acoustic properties of bowls to study the interaction of solids and liquids.
High-speed shooting has shown how the sound vibrations of the bowl walls generate concentric waves on the water surface. However, the most interesting thing was observed with increasing amplitude. At a certain intensity of sounding, waves on the surface of the water begin to break, and hundreds of small drops fly into the air. This levitation becomes stable, and the drops themselves can stay in the air for a long time and move along the surface. Similar effects can be observed with a glass of wine.
Physicists mathematically described the phenomena that occur on the surface of the water, and calculated the parameters on which the onset of levitation depends.
The data obtained can be useful for calculating the wind loads of buildings and bridges. “Despite the fact that the system demonstrates the interaction of a solid with a liquid, we were more motivated by curiosity than by the possibility of engineering applications. Anyone can get a new surprise by changing the bowl or the properties of the liquid,”explained John Bush, author of the paper published in the journal Nonlinearity.