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by xeonmc 542 days ago
a vibrating string make sine waves, a vibrating bubble make spherical harmonics.
1 comments

Love it, that's a fantastic image for these. As a musician intimately aware of how vibrating strings work, the vibrating bubble is a perfect analogy, it seems.
Musicians: see also radial planar circular harmonics, e.g. drums. This is a halfway point in between vibrating strings and vibrating bubbles. It’s highly applicable in music and is easier to understand and visualize than 3d basis functions; maybe a nice stepping stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membr...