Citizen Science
Build It Yourself
Replicate the core CWM experiments with a glass rod, a microphone, and a spectrum analyzer app. Submit your results to build a community dataset that validates the physics.
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Full Experiment Guide
90-page PDF with step-by-step procedures for all 14 experiments, a complete $230 bill of materials ($38 core) with purchase links, printable data worksheets, failure-mode mitigations, and full-scale illustration plates. Designed so a middle school teacher can run the full protocol in one week.
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Interactive Demo
CWM Lab
Sign in to run the reservoir computing memory demo on simulation, reference glass data, or your own hardware. Train an Echo State Network, encode messages into vibrational fingerprints, and decode them from memory.
Experiment 1: Mode Persistence
Do eigenmodes survive perturbation?
Strike a glass rod and measure the frequency spectrum. Apply a small mass perturbation (silicone putty, tape, or clay), then re-measure. The eigenmode frequencies should shift but remain sharp peaks — demonstrating that perturbation encoding is viable.
Equipment
- • Glass rod or tube (borosilicate, 6–12 mm diameter, 150–300 mm length)
- • Piezoelectric buzzer or small speaker for excitation
- • Microphone + spectrum analyzer app (e.g., Spectroid, phyphox)
- • Small mass for perturbation (silicone putty, blu-tack, or tape ~0.1 g)
- • Digital scale (0.01 g resolution)
- • Ruler or calipers
Expected Results
Frequencies should shift by 0.1–5% depending on perturbation mass and position. Peaks should remain sharp (high Q). The shift pattern encodes position information via the sin² sensitivity function.
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