Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/29/watch-a-half-hour-of-fingersty.html
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The video is beautiful to listen to and to watch. The patterns that you see on the strings aren’t their real motion but an artifact of how the camera works. It’s called rolling shutter and is pretty interesting in its own right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter
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the immense skill of the playing alone is worth checking out, and the camera perspective is interesting in-and-of-itself, but being able to see the soundwaves flowing through the individual strings is completely mesmerizing. I knew that was how the sound was produced, but I never knew it was visible on a human scale before. no other viewpoint I’ve witnessed firsthand or via a camera had obviated it that way. super cool.
ETA whelp, @zkossover, guess you wrote that while I was writing mine. artifact or no, it does seem to depict the soundwaves, though.
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But how’d they get inside the guitar to tape the video?
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Its a camera for ants.
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Noooo! Not the fingers of doom! The torturous picking! When will it end?
It’s not the rolling shutter effect, it’s the wagon-wheel effect: you know in movies (24 frames per second) when you see a car slowing down, and its wheels appear to slow to a stop and change direction? This happens when the wheels are close to a rotational frequency that is a multiple of 24 Hz. It only has to do with the number of frames per second and the frequency of rotation (in that case–it’s the frequency of string vibration in this case). Notice that the first and second strings, when they play a low B, appear to almost stand still (a standing wave): this is because that frequency, 62 Hz, is a close multiple of the framerate of whatever device recorded this. (Probably 30 frames per second? Don’t know enough about it to say–it could be 60 I guess?)
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Of course the thing that bugged me most (get it, bugged me? hehe) about that movie was the fact that, even ignoring all the other biomechanical scaling issues, the kids’ visual spectrum would be shifted into the ultraviolet and they’d no longer be able to see things they could at their normal size. (I’m told I overthink movies.)
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