Born in Basel Switzerland in 1904, Jennys love of nature & music were strong influences
from an early age. As a child he was a gifted keyboard player and although a career in
music seemed his most likely route he chose instead to become a physician. After completing his doctorate he taught science at the Rudolph Steiner school in Zurich for
four years, before setting up his own medical practice in the Swiss village of Dornach.


Jennys naturalistic approach to his work informed his view of Cymatics & sound and their
part in the creation of the universe. Jenny was an advocate of the idea that Cymatics described a sound-matrix at work in nature, an invisible driving force that could create everything from the wave-like shape of a mountain range to the stripes on a zebra or the petals on a flower


"The more one studies these things, the more one realizes that sound is the creative
principle. It must be regarded as primordial. No single phenomenal category can be
claimed as the aboriginal principle. We cannot say, in the beginning was numbers
or in the beginning was symmetry, etc..... They are not themselves
the creative power. This power is inherent in tone, in sound." - Hans Jenny

In fact Jenny is just one in a long line of venerated scientist / philosophers involved with Cymatics, stretching all the way back to the original Father of Science Galileo.

Galileo was the first to notice the formation of regular patterns on an oscillating body while
experimenting with plates & chisels in 1632.

''....scraping a brass plate with a sharp iron chisel in order to remove some spots from it and running the chisel rather rapidly over it, I once or twice, during many strokes, heard the plate emit a rather strong and clear whistling sound: on looking at the plate more carefully
I noticed a long row of fine streaks parallel and equidistant from one another.." - Galileo


1680 : Royal society member, philosopher, architect and polymath Robert Hooke also noticed nodal patterns forming as he ran a violin bow along the edge of a glass plate covered with a fine layer of flour. Hooke is better known for giving us his law of elasticity [Hooke's Law] than for popularizing Cymatics.

it wasn't until Ernst Chladni later repeated Hookes experiments, publishing his findings
in the book Discoveries in the Theory of sound [1787] that Cymatics began to reach
a wider audience.

Chladnis book describes how sand sprinkled on a plate could be excited by drawing a bow along the plates edge. When the bowed plate reached resonance the sand formed a pattern showing the nodal regions, almost exactly the same experiment that Galileo and Hooke had carried out many years previously. Because of Chladni's book however, his became the name most associated with the vibrating plate phenomena now known as the Chladni Plate

Variations on the Chladni plate [Chaldni modes] are still in use today by many instrument manufacturers. Most typically used in the design and build of guitars, violins and Cellos Chladni modes help to visually reveal how the body of an instrument is resonating at a given frequency, identifying potential problems during the instruments construction.

Image use & thanks

image *1 : Photo of Dr. Hans Jenny from Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration
by Hans Jenny © 2001 MACROmedia Publishing, NH USA.http:// www.cymaticsource.com

image *2 : Galileo Galilee. Public domain image from http://commons.wikimedia.org
/wiki/File:Bolton-galileo.jpg

image *3 : Ernst Chladni. Public domain image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Martin-Chladni-01.jpg

image *4 : Chladni modes on guitar body. Thanks to Alan at
http://www.dunwellguitar.com/

image *5 Tonoscope. Author unknown. Image sourced from http://rexresearch.com/
cymatics/cymatics.htm