A somewhat more scholarly treatment is here: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/chladni.html (and links off of that page, but I found the chladni plate discussion to be .. almost.. understandable).
I started looking at this stuff a while back because a friend had talked about pocket violins (specifically pochette's some rather fantastic modern examples of which can be found here: http://www.owenmorse-brown.com/pochette.htm and a moderately well done amateur build here: http://crab.rutgers.edu/~pbutler/pochette.html) which I found rather interesting and thought to myself "hmm perhaps an ..easy.. first foot into that water", after a bit of reading I decided to put this one off for a while and try a few more simpler things first
That would be hard to tuck under your chin. My clarinet instructor told me that the clarinet replaces the violin in a band. Maybe that's what caused the confusion.