Silica song: Where science, art and the spirit meet

It could almost be the chanting of Tibetan monks, a song beyond time, yet the setting is rigorous and clinical -- the laboratory of French physicist Stephane Douady, where a robot arm is pushing small, precisely measured amounts of sand down a plexiglass ring.

Douady is a leading expert in a very narrow field. He is investigating one of the most romantic yet maddening phenomena in the natural world: the "song of the dunes."

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Travellers in the desert have long known that shifting sand can make an eerie noise, ranging from a bass boom to a baritone bark and a soprano whistle. Research into dunes also has practical outlets. Douady's lab also replicates the desert on a 1/1,000 scale, creating dunes made from tiny ceramic balls and using water instead of wind, to see how the sand advances.

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"We are trying to understand chaos, and we are finding systems which gain in complexity with the passage of time."