Sounds like a Picasso

‘Oscilloscope Music’

We made a short video following a bit of tinkering with an old oscilloscope. Oscilloscopes are tools that can be used for a multitude of tasks, but we were playing with sound and images.

Videos about oscilloscope music generally focus on music that also displays images when played through an oscilloscope. but it that the bit we find most interesting. What’s more interesting is to think about waves and the different way they can be illustrated.

Waves can be examined in more than one way

Ways that you can look at waves include (but aren’t limited to):

• Convert them to electricity, send them to a speaker and listen to them.

• Convert them to electricity, send them to an oscilloscope and look at them.

So it isn’t sound making pictures, it’s waves that can be illustrated as either sound and pictures. In the case of artists like Jerobeam Fenderson, both forms of the waves are beautiful.

Anyway, enough pedantry. When making the video, we used the boostbox to send music to the oscilloscope. Having spent some time with it, we’re using it for much more than looking at YouTube videos (thanks tmux). Here’s a photo of it, for no other reason than how good it looks.