Sound can do more than just provide a nice beat. Sound waves have been used for everything from mapping the seafloor to breaking apart kidney stones. Thanks to a unique material structure, researchers can now move and position objects underwater without ever touching them directly.

Dajun Zhang, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presents his work on developing a metamaterial for underwater acoustic manipulation on Tuesday, May 20, at 3:20 p.m. CT as part of the joint 188th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and 25th International Congress on Acoustics, running May 18–23.

A metamaterial is a composite material that exhibits unique properties due to its structure. Zhang’s metamaterial features a small sawtooth pattern on its surface, which allows adjacent speakers to exert different forces on the material based on how the sound waves reflect off it. By carefully targeting the floating or submerged metamaterial with precise sound waves, Zhang can push and rotate any object attached to it exactly as much as he wants.