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Music

Glitch Mob's New Video Is An Extreme Close-Up Of Vibrating Water

"Becoming Harmonious," directed by Susi Sie, matches Nature's refined elegance to gorgeous glitch dubstep.

Against a canvas of malleable matter, sound waves create clear patterns of vibrations, revealing the beautiful, symmetrical designs at the bottom of everything. First demonstrated in the late 18th Century by German physicist Ernst Chladni, these otherwise invisible properties reap the benefits of our nascent new millennium: under a 100mm macro lens, these minute movements are captured in stunning detail.

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For Glitch Mob's new video "Becoming Harmonious," director Susi Sie uses the same methods that revealed this micro-motion, but gets way closer in on the action. Capturing the results of a subwoofer stacked against water, Sie's video begins with frequencies that create fluid geometric patterns that closely following the song's gradual buildup. As the track progresses, increasingly defined shapes appear, and by the time the bass drops, it's a full-on aqua dance party. Water goes wild to the sounds of the Glitch Mob, resulting in wild, fluctuating elliptical patterns.

It's a project as simple as it is absolutely effective: to create the video, Sie used nothing more than water, a subwoofer, and a 5D camera with a macro lens. The real feat is how well she matched the water's variations with the audible changes in the tune. Our favorite moment? That perfectly-timed shudder that streaks across the screen at 2:50.

Check out more awesome images from "Becoming Harmonious" below, and for more of Susi Sie's work, check out her website here.

For more macro art and sound art see:

Analog Photography Trick Leads To Mother Of All Sound Visualizations

Liquid Vibrations: 'Wet Sounds,' The Underwater Sound Art Installation

'The Motion Paradox': Kaleidoscopic VJ Visuals Mapped To Dark Electronic Beats