DON’T TRY THIS (but they look cool)

These experimenters use physics, fire and music to make awesome visual effects.  The scientific term is Rubens’ Tube.  Here is a brief intro on what is happening from a physics perspective:

The pressure variations due to the sound waves affect the flow rate of flammable gas from the holes in the Pyro Board and therefore affect the height and colour of flames. This is interesting for visualizing standing wave patterns and simply awesome to watch when put to music. Thank you to Sune Nielsen and everyone at Aarhus for sharing this demonstration with me! And thanks for having me at your conference.

First off don’t try these at home or without the supervision of a professional.  What’s also really neat is this dj goes around Denmark showing kids about physics with his fiery board.  I wish they had this when I was a kid.  He doesn’t show you how to make this one at home like a lot of DIY videos but a professional fabricator could probably figure it out.  The top 5 songs I would play to this fireboard would be:

• Firestarter by Prodigy
• Ghosts n’ Stuff by Deadmau5
• Ruffneck by Skrillex
• Habstraky by Gimme featuring badjokes
• Datsik the blastas

1. I wonder what would happen if he blasted Twisted Sister’s classis “We’re Not Gonna take It”.  What song would you play through a 2d lit up pyro board?

2.  This is another great board.  The home experimenter references the first video actually in his intro:

So if you’re watching this, you’ve surely seen the Veritasium video on the pyro board. Whelp… seems like a fun little project. But before I drop mucho dinero on stuff to build one, DanKn and I decided to start small and learn some things. Not everything went as planned, but it’s a good start.

No, wood wasn’t the best choice of materials. But it’s a prototype! We only let it run for a few minutes so it wouldn’t get hot enough to ignite the wood. By mounting the speaker directly to the box, we were hoping to figure out if it REALLY needed to be spaced off the side. Spoiler alert: It does. There’s also a whole bunch of other changes we want to test before the full scale thing, but that’ll have to wait for another day.

3.  This guy built one that resembles a tube more closely.  Instead of edm/techno he plays a more folksy song and you can see how it effects things.

4.  This one is pumping some reggae music through it.  Pretty cool.

5.  This one is a bit different in that is is circlular

A Flame Box is a physics apparatus published by Harold Daw. It is like a Ruben’s Tube except rather than sound in a line, it is sound in a plane. The effect is more subtle, but surprising in their nuance. I built my own Flame Box to show the resonant modes of sound as part of a conference presentation called Seeing Sound, in Nature and Code.