Why do guitar strings look so wibbly-wobbly in smartphone videos?

January 20, 2015 at 10:11 a.m. EST

You've got to admit that the above guitar string video is

mesmerizing.

But if you've ever played a guitar, you know that the strings don't literally wobble up and

down in perfect approximations of the sound waves they're producing

. That kind of wiggling would probably disrupt your speedy rifts. And personally, I'd never be able to play through a whole song if that's the awesome view I got every time I looked down. Vine user Logan Gendizzle has other examples of these wiggling strings to check out, too:

But that's not exactly what guitar strings look like in real life. Here's a slow motion video showing the real deal:

So what makes these videos different? All of the Vine clips were taken on a smartphone -- and the camera had what's called a rolling shutter.

When you take a picture with a camera that has a global shutter, the whole image is exposed at once. But a rolling shutter works line by line. (See an illustration of the difference here)

Rolling shutters are less expensive, so they're standard issue in phone cameras. But when objects in the shot move super fast -- like a vibrating string, for example -- the camera loses some of the object's movement as it scans line by line. It's like watching someone move in a strobe light.

So even though these oscillations look like they could be the actual vibrations that cause a string to produce sound, they're not -- it's just a cool camera effect.