The Decepticon Soundwave had some cool powers. He could read minds, jam radio signals, remember anything with his photographic memory, read the electromagnetic spectrum, and perform his microcasette operations. Actual soundwaves can’t do any of those things, but they can make some wild patterns, through a process called sonolithography. Here’s more from hackaday:

Sonolithography is a method of patterning materials on to a surface using finely-controlled sound waves. To achieve this, [Oliver] created a circular array of sixteen ultrasonic transducers controlled via shift registers and gate driver ICs, under the command of a Raspberry Pi Pico. He then created an app for controlling the transducer array via an attached computer with a GUI interface. It allows the phase and amplitude of each element of the array to be controlled to create different patterns.

Creating a pattern is then a simple matter of placing the array on a surface, firing it up in a given drive mode, and then atomising some kind of dye or other material to visualize the pattern of the acoustic waves.

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