What is oscilloscope music?

Oscilloscope music is audio composed so that when played through an oscilloscope in X-Y mode, the electrical signal draws recognisable shapes and images on the screen. Artists like Jerobeam Fenderson create work where both the sound and the visual output are intentionally beautiful.

How does an oscilloscope display sound as images?

A sound wave converted to electricity can be sent to a speaker to be heard, or to an oscilloscope to be seen. In X-Y mode, the stereo signal controls the beam position simultaneously on both axes, drawing shapes rather than a simple waveform. The same wave — two different representations.

Oscilloscope Music | Sounds Like a Picasso

We made a short video following a bit of tinkering with an old analogue 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 that isn’t the bit we find most interesting.

What’s most interesting to us is the fact that waves can be visualised in multiple ways.

Here’s a downloadable sound we made that sounds pretty nondescript through a speaker, but is a veritable work of art when displayed on an oscilloscope:

Waves can be examined in more than one way

You can look at waves in lots of ways, but the two we’re interested in here are:

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 or 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. Here’s the video:

Oscilloscope Music | Sounds like a Picasso

Waves can be examined in more than one way

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