These Scientists Used Fire To Accompany Their Music, And It's Beautiful

Yay for science.

A Rubens' tube is a pipe with holes in it. You put a flammable gas through the pipe, and then light it on fire. Kind of like the pipes in your gas-powered barbecue.

But what happens when you play music through the tubes? These scientists in Denmark built a "Pyro Board" to find out, and made a video showing the results. The description of the video explains what's happening: "The pressure variations due to the sound waves affect the flow rate of flammable gas from the holes in the Pyro Board and therefore affect the height and colour of flames."

Obviously don't try this at home.

When you play sounds into the tubes, the air vibrations make a pattern where there's a lot of vibration in some parts, and not a lot in other parts. This affects the flow rate of the gas.

The scientists made a two-dimensional board with 2,500 holes in it for this project.

The scientists made this because they "really like the Rubens' tube, and but then we thought, 'When you put on more fire, it always gets better.'" True enough.

At first the scientists just play standing sound waves through the tubes.

And this is what it looks like when actual music plays through the Rubens' tube. The big flames happen when big there's big bass.

Of course all this is way better when you can hear the actual music playing. Check it out:

(Via HyperVocal)