iPhone Camera Captures Amazing Oscillations On Guitar Strings

Ever wonder what it would look like to put your iPhone 4 camera inside your guitar? Didn’t think so, but YouTube user justkylevid did and he ended up with some fascinating results. Even if you are not a guitar player, it is interesting to see the science behind the waves the iPhone 4 CMOS sensor picks up from inside the guitar. The iPhone 4 creates an interesting effect in how it captures the string vibrations, which is caused by the rolling shutter capture. Rolling shutter capture is common in many video cameras. It captures the frame by rolling over the sensor either vertically or horizontally. The shutter exposes the sensor to the light from the image in a rolling motion until the entire frame is exposed. This generally happens fast, about 1/60 of a second, but sometimes that is not fast enough as demonstrated in the video below. This is not the true physics behind the oscillations of the guitar strings and there have been some interesting discussions on the topic. However, it does create an effect that gives us an idea of what the strings are actually doing in order to create the sound. Even the different notes, the type of picking and the dampening on the strings shows a different wave effect. If you want to give it a try yourself, justkylevids has provided a couple of tips to help make it work:

You must have the strings brightly backlit to get the camera to capture at such a high frame rate (pure conjecture). You can see how the effect fades when the buildings come into view. Use a pencil. This was used with the front facing camera, try the back camera, it may capture better!

I enjoy playing around with my guitar, but I don’t know if I need to try this, considering  justkylevids already did. I imagine it will look similar from one iPhone 4 to another. It would be interesting though to see if the back facing camera does something different. Are any readers up to the task? If so, give us an update on what happens!