The Review 2015

31 Seeding the Future Original thinking, experimentation and risk-taking – the engines of innovation – have been embraced by academic staff and students and by HKU itself. The University will drive this trend forward in the coming years by seeking new ways to break down physical, disciplinary and other boundaries in education and knowledge, and raising the profile of entrepreneurship and technology transfer on campus (see Research page 14). Fluid Melodies from the Lab An undergraduate experiment that uncovered unexpected and mysterious ripples in a container of liquids has resulted in a discovery that, among other things, can visualise sound and was published this year in Scientific Reports by Nature Publishing Group. The students had been looking at the interface of two liquids that do not mix (similar to oil and water) when they noticed the minute ripples. They traced the source to vibrations from a specially- calibrated syringe that was infusing the liquids into their device – but the discovery did not stop there. Zida Li, a research assistant who was helping the students, was playing music over his phone’s speakers and noticed that it triggered the same ripple effect. The team, which also included Mechanical Engineering undergraduates Sibyl Mak Sze-yi, Jimmy Chan Tat-chuen (pictured with their supervisor Dr Anderson Shum) and exchange student Arnaud Frere, decided to see if they could harness the ripple effect to a creative end. “The frequency of the generated ripples were exactly the same frequency of the sound that we applied, which was very exciting. We naturally came to this cool idea of using this system to visualise and recover music,” said Zida, who is now doing his PhD at the University of Michigan. Sibyl, who graduated in 2013 and is doing her PhD a t HKU, explained the effect: “The f luid interface is l ike a very f loppy cloth which can easily be folded, even wi th a very smal l osci l lat ion. The oscillation we applied was a sound wave and we found we could control the corrugation of the fluid interface through the pitch, harmonics and loudness of the music.” Dr Shum said he had also had research opportunities as an undergraduate and he was excited by the students’ discovery. ( In fact, pr ior to this research, Sibyl was enrol led in HKU’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship Programme for academically outstanding students. Some 200 students have been enrolled since the first round in 2012–13.) “The entire team learned their research tasks with great passion and belief. I am very proud that their works were recognised and published in a respectable journal,” he said. The Review 2015 Innovation