Oscilloscope Music N-Spheres | Hacker News Reader

Oscilloscope Music N-Spheres

oscilloscopemusic.com

137 pointswebmaven22 comments

If you like this sort of thing, I highly recommend checking out C. Allen’s work. The visuals and music are both really impressive, in my opinion the best out there: https://youtu.be/OP7sTQQ0Blw

If you want to approximate an X-Y oscilloscope on your system, check out https://github.com/timstr/oszilloskop

This means this is also the perfect audio visualisation ever. You see exactly what you here.

Ah ha. From a decade ago now:

Clark - Superscope https://youtu.be/TKYrwuxLZtY

Clark - Riff Through The Fog https://youtu.be/efnsrLg03e4?si=grC1M4XlXdV1L6VB

The Oscilloscope Music scene has really come a long way! I love the aesthetic and that got me started on a project to convert an old portable CRT TV into an oscilloscope. There's something really satisfying knowing that the visuals directly mirror the sound. Getting something visually pleasing while still sounding musical is a really interesting challenge. Hansi Raber from oscilloscopemusic.com even wrote his own software for that purpose: https://oscilloscopemusic.com/software/oscistudio/

I approve of this enthusiasm, but TFA is already oscilloscopemusic.com

TFA is not putting music on an oscilloscope. Some of it is actually plotting frequency vs time in the video, so it's nice demo stuff but not true oscilloscope music.

Long ago I did like you and converted an CRT TV to accept audio on the deflection coils (left, right -> X,Y). I can highly recommend 2 particular songs for that setup:

1) Cathedral by VanHalen

2) Lunatic Fringe by Red Rider

By all means use a CD if you can rather than MP3 - I'm not sure how degraded the MP3 would be so maybe it's fine.

I think it is plotting music on an oscilloscope. It just happens to have some very meta visuals.

From TFA:

> Oscilloscope Music is music that creates it's own visuals.

> The same signal that goes to the speakers is also fed into an analog oscilloscope to draw green glowing lines.

> The left and right audio channels correspond to the horizontal and vertical axes of the image.

> Parametric functions are meticulously crafted to create synesthetic geometries in a lab aesthetic that is retro and futuristic at the same time.

> The tricky part is to create images that sound good and vice versa, which demands novel methods of synthesis, mixing and mastering.

This is exactly was TFA does.

> but not true oscilloscope music.

you must have a very unique definition of music. by every definition I've looked up, this meets all of them.

because surely you're not disputing the oscilloscope part of it

>> because surely you're not disputing the oscilloscope part of it

Yes, I'm disputing the oscilloscope part of it. An oscilloscope does not plot pitch vs time. You could devise circuitry to do something like that.

Having plugged audio directly into an oscilloscope, I can say that's not how it works. Well, not all of it. The into seemed more like it might actually be left/right audio into a scope, but the other parts did not.

> Having plugged audio directly into an oscilloscope

i'd suggest you do it again before making baseless accusations. they provide you the ability to download the audio. they even provide a bit of software to drive lasers with the data.

as a follow up to my own post. I couldn't remember the video, but the YT algo found it for me[0]. Smarter Every Day did a video with the same people from TFA that shows exactly how they do these. I can't find any better evidence to show your "thoughts" being totally baseless.

I hate double replying, but I was busy

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gibcRfp4zA

> An oscilloscope does not plot pitch vs time.

You're right, it doesn't, and that's not what's happening here. It uses the X/Y deflection mode of the oscilloscope, plotting left channel vs right channel.

If you don't believe it, play it on an oscilloscope yourself. (I have!)

The machine elves are gonna love this.

That music is an experience, really nicely done.

Does anybody know if the executable will run under Linux?

Oscillofun is the first one I've seen, and I still love the music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4YyI6_y6kw

That has to be the fanciest packaging for a floppy disk I have ever seen

How is this not a demoscène product? Cause it very much seems to be, though not mentioned as such in the text …?

I am not an expert but I believe CRO music grew independently of the demoscene movement

It’s been around longer and the overlap might not be as large as you’d expect

Do the definitions of these two overlap? Apart from having music and images?

This is so lovely <3

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