This video purports to show an amateur experiment in which someone created a small gravitational field "using a speaker and a generated sound wave." The instructions say that a Bose Companion 2 Series II speaker was used, and a "sine wave at 16 khz" was generated.
Obviously it's fake. Audio speakers will not create a gravity field. But I'm not sure how they created the special effect. (Not that I know much about creating video effects.)
Perhaps they used some kind of fancy editing software. Or perhaps they did it a really low-tech way -- moving the objects one frame at a time to make it appear as if they were sliding towards the speaker. If they did it the latter way, they managed to make the sliding effect look very smooth.
Perhaps it's a viral ad for Bose speakers.
For some reason this video keeps getting removed from Metacafe. Hopefully it'll stay up long enough for you to see it.
Comments
The whole "room" (table, wall, camera) is small and on a fixed but tiltable mount. When he's ready for the object to move, he simply lifts the "room" and the object slides down to the speaker, while from the camera's perspective everything stays level. Unfortunately for him, the frame isn't fixed tightly enough to the wall, so it shifts a little each time and blows the secret.
It's a little like that classic Fred Astaire scene where he's dancing on the walls, filmed in a rotating room.
If it were sliding into the speaker on an incline, it wouldn't "right" itself after bouncing off the speaker.
Plus, right after he lets go of the glue bottle it "jumps" onto the magnet. Just a slight movement to the right, but visible.
The cell phone strap would probably not 'stick' to the table on an incline, either.
The stapler jumps backwards as he lets go of it.
Magnet.
I'd still say that the glue would not bounce back - or perhaps they got lucky or did several shots to get it just right and confuse the issue.
Also, I see the picture tilting then back, then tilting, so I imagine they edited it out of the original sequence.
It's fun anyway!!!!
The "Mosquito's buzz" is usually around 17kHz, but can go from 16kHz and up.
(See older post about the Mosquito: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/4160/ )
16 thousand Hertz? HAH. 😛
On the pull away shot, pause it and you can see the other orange dongle of the cord on the floor.
Much less a power cable for the speaker, usually the one with the volume knob has the power cord... Don't know about this particular model though.
Picture for the lazy:
Enjoyable riddle here, though!
Funnily enough, the manual doesn't mention telepathy or anything else out of the ordinary.
They did movie tricks this way in roaring 20's.
Objects sitting on the table would be held in place by friction (and not slide) until the speaker is turned on at a frequency that causes the entire tabletop to vibrate. Once the vibration was established, the items on the table would tend to 'walk' down the slope.
The speaker itself could be kept stationary if it had rubber (shock absorbent) feet, which many of them do.
The objects would appear to move smooothly because they would be making tiny 'steps' at the same frequency as the vibration in the surface of the table.
In other words, what 'Harry' said.
do the magnetic jump when he places it down and before he turns on the sound!
Just the first thing that jumped to mind. Kind of like putting your into the blender to turn it off...
However, it looks awefully like a viral to me. It begins with a nice shot of the brand name before the video. There is a nicely set camera angle with a shot of the hand turning on the camera before each test. It is decently lit (for a "home video"). Then, right before the end, we see an intertitle slide reminding us of the Speakers. Finally, we get an unnecessary pullback shot, enough to reaffirm it was a "home video" to the viewer. Especially in a video otherwise so well edited, it seems completely out of place.
Viral videos seem to often try to remind us that they are home videos in an attempt to make them seem legitimate. It seems to be the general concensus that this has at least some video tricks employed. It seems like a lot to go through for such little return. I mean, what other motive would someone have for making a fake video about their speakers.
I'm certainly not ruling out that it is real (in the sense that it was one unaffiliated person that made the video). However, it seems to contain a lot of the classic elements of a viral.
Not only did I notice that the picture on the all kept moving from shot to shot, but it seemed weirdly placed - too low to be realistic, yet low enough to be in the shot to give realism to the background.
I think a magnet would make the objects jump or jerk before being moved.
But, no.
Maybe the speaker is an electromagnet.
Let the movie load, and then scrub through fast from beginning to end. The picture on the wall behind is getting rotated round a little more each time.
Therefore, I think the whole room is a set (including fake floor), the camera and probably lights are also attached, and everything tilts, so that the items just slide downhill towards the speaker. They are always placed very carefully so that they will slide in a line and "land" on the front of the speaker. If they'd been to the side just a little, they would have fallen past the speaker, and the game would be up.
If you've ever seen the footage of the Tacoma-Narrows bridge heaving back and forth before crashing to the water below, then you know how powerful resonance can be. The bridge collapse was caused by the wind vibrating the bridge causing it to oscillate at one of it's natural frequencies.
As noted by FrostBird, I get a frequency of a G above middle C on a piano keyboard, right at 400hz.
If the table was leaning even a little, it would vibrate itself downward.
There is no magic, and no voodoo. And certainly has nothing to do with magnets. Sorry, but Elmer's is just not magnetic. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't even slightly diamagnetic (and you would need extrodinary magnets to physically test this).
For the claim that no other speaker would do this, it could be something as simple as rubber feet on the bottom of the other speakers damping the vibrations. How many speakers did he test?
One important note is that there is a cut immediately before the pull-away! This means that the whole setup might have been made in a smaller tiltable model, and then the pieces moved into a room to 'prove as genuine'.
Plus, as others have mentioned, the speaker is clearly not plugged in, so it's faking even at the basic level.
Biggest giveaway for me - the cut from the end of the last experiment. You see the slide, then a title card, and then a pullaway - not in one shot. And if you look carefully at the picture at the end of the last experiment and the beginning of the pullaway, you can see that it suddenly gains a shadow - because it's not stuck firm to the wall any more.
BUSTED!
monofilament, object placed on monofilament and pulled.
When pulled, same effect.
Notice how glue bottle slides as being put down.