There are five general senses: touch for feels, taste for food, smell for avoiding trash, hearing for sounds, and, of course, eyesight for visualizing the very waves making up that sound. [PlasmatronX] drives that last point home with his camera for sound waves, that’s even able to capture constructive and destructive interference. (Video, embedded below.)

You may have heard of Schlieren imaging, which is usually used to capture the movement of air currents caused by heat sources. [PlasmatronX] sets up a concave mirror to amplify the refraction of different densities of air, only unlike traditional Schlieren setups, he’s after the different densities of air caused by the pressure waves that we interpret as sound.

To capture the sound waves, you could have a camera with the shutter speed to match, but cameras with that ability run quite a premium. The route taken by [Plasma] uses a cleverly synced audio and optical capture system. Even this wasn’t easy, though. Audio circuits have to be modified to remove high-pass filters, and the LED flash has to be overvolted to allow for the quick strobe.

If you want your own try with visualizing sound, check out [PlasmatronX]’s GitHub project here! While this particular imaging technique may be new for us, crazy imaging certainly isn’t in the general sense. For example, check out this camera for something even crazier, light!