Collider Showers

Seven crystals of the row, the struck key's in the middle and its neighbours a semitone either side, the particle coming in from the collision on the left. The glow is the heat each shower left along a crystal; the lines are the crystal ringing, in slow motion and exaggerated: the stretching modes squeeze the marks along it together and apart, the bending modes curve it.

The last shower's profile along the crystal, from the front face to the back (the shaded part past it leaked out), and the crystal's first few stretching modes, whose strain the heat projects onto: a mode whose strain changes sign under the shower's peak is hardly rung. The bars are how loud each mode rings now, the stretching modes' harmonics and, in amber, the bending modes.

A harmonic series, a little flat at the top (the crystal's thickness slows its higher modes), whose upper lines die first; off the axis the bending modes join it, and with pile-up the lines keep being lit again.