I have just learned of what is either a remarkable development with implications in many fields or, more likely, a new form of pseudoscience. It is a device called the Cymascope. Information about it may be had at the Cymascope web site. The Cymascope is a device for visualizing sound by causing a membrane to vibrate and shining lights on the membrane. It is claimed that this new method of visualizing sound has already led to marvelous new insights in fields ranging from Astrophysics and Biology to Egyptology and Musicology.
That a new method of visualization might lead to impressive advances is not in and of itself absurd: examples include the development of the microscope, the telescope, and the sound sonograph. What is peculiar about the literature on the Cymascope is that there is no discussion of how it compares to other methods of visualizing sound or of what is mathematical properties are. We are just presented with some admittedly quite pretty pictures and asked to gaze upon them.
One of the areas in which advances are claimed is Phonology, an area with which I have some familiarity. The sole example discussed is the characterization of the vowels, or more accurately, the five vowels of English that the investigators are aware of. The marvelous new result they claim to have obtained is the negation of the following remarkable claim:
Previously it had been assumed that each of the five vowels would have the same basic form for every person.
Something like this was true more than half a century ago, but anyone with even a modest acquaintance with acoustic phonetics should know that finding invariant acoustic properties that distinguish one vowel from another across speakers and phonological contexts has been one of the major problems in the field for decades. So far all I see are pretty pictures, no scientific results.