Word.ws English Dictionary

Chladni plate

Chladni plate noun: a flat sheet of metal (generally square or circular) mounted on a central pillar, over which sand or other particles are sprinkled, which when bowed vibrates and arranges the sand particles into patterns (Chladni figures), allowing for the visualization, and analysis, of sound.

Noun

Chladni plate (plural Chladni plates)

  1. A flat sheet of metal (generally square or circular) mounted on a central pillar, over which sand or other particles are sprinkled, which when bowed vibrates and arranges the sand particles into patterns (Chladni figures), allowing for the visualization, and analysis, of sound.
    • […] the phenomenon of forced, or sympathetic, vibrations may be beautifully shown by having two Chladni plates exactly alike, and setting one in vibration by bowing. The sand will gather along the nodal lines, showing that vibrations of a certain character exists upon the plate. If, now, sand is...1909, Benjamin Warner Snow, Notes on Physics, page 579
    • Why should a Chladni plate, possessing many inharmonic mode frequences, set up a cooperative resonance when bowed? How sticking and slipping works with a bow and a Chladni plate is not so clear, since in the pure sinusoidal mode there is no sawtooth Helmholtz kink wave to follow the bow in the...2013, Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear what You Hear: An Experiential Approach to Sound, Music, and Psychoacoustics, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 297

Examples of Chladni plate in a sentence

  • […] the phenomenon of forced, or sympathetic, vibrations may be beautifully shown by having two Chladni plates exactly alike, and setting one in vibration by bowing.1909, Benjamin Warner Snow, Notes on Physics, page 579:
  • Why should a Chladni plate, possessing many inharmonic mode frequences, set up a cooperative resonance when bowed?2013, Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear what You Hear: An Experiential Approach to Sound, Music, and Psychoacoustics, Princeton University...

Forms of Chladni plate

pluralChladni plates
alternative formChladni's plate

Origin of Chladni plate

Named after their inventor, German scientist Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni.

Questions about Chladni plate

What does Chladni plate mean?
Chladni plate means a flat sheet of metal (generally square or circular) mounted on a central pillar, over which sand or other particles are sprinkled, which when bowed vibrates and arranges the sand particles into patterns (Chladni figures), allowing for the visualization, and analysis, of sound.
How do you use Chladni plate in a sentence?
[…] the phenomenon of forced, or sympathetic, vibrations may be beautifully shown by having two Chladni plates exactly alike, and setting one in vibration by bowing.
What part of speech is Chladni plate?
Chladni plate is a noun.
What is the plural of Chladni plate?
The plural of Chladni plate is Chladni plates.

Words near Chladni plate in the dictionary

  1. Chladni
  2. Chladni figure
  3. Chladni figures
  4. Chladni pattern
  5. Chladni patterns
  6. Chladni plate
  7. Chladni plates
  8. Chladni's figure
  9. Chladni's plate
  10. Chladni's plates
  11. chladniite

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Chladni plate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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