This is *so* beautiful!
This is What Happens When You Run Water Through a 24hz Sine Wave | Colossal
Just to clarify what I’m 99.999% certain is happening here: The photographer is buzzing the water with a 24hz sound wave–thus creating a wave in the falling water that oscillates 24 times each second. He then shoots video of it at 24 frames per second. Provided that the video is interlaced (which is the norm with modern digital video), then FPS rate and Hz are equal, and so his camera is always catching the wave at the same position in its oscillation–thus the illusion of a frozen wave of water. When he bumps the sound wave up a notch, to 25 Hz, you see a slowly progressing water-wave, because now each subsequent image capture is catching the wave at a *slightly* different position further along its oscillation (same with the water-flowing-backward effect he gets when he dumps the oscillation down to 23 Hz). You can get the same effect in a dark room by exciting a stream of water with a sound wave coordinated with a strobe light.
In real life, if you were standing there in the garden, the hose would just look like it was pouring a plain old sloppy stream of water; it’s the magic of shooting at a frame rate that matches the oscillation rate of the wave that makes this magic. So *rad!*
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