Episode: 2192
Title: HPR2192: Fun with Oscilloscopes
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2192/hpr2192.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:30:53

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This is HPR episode 2192 entitled, fun with oscilloscope.
It is hosted by M1RR0R5H4D35 and in about 10 minutes long and carry the next visit flag.
The summary is, taking a look at oscilloscope music.
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Hello world, it's me again and today I'm going to talk about an interesting thing I
found on the internet.
It's a little bit different, not very practical but very very cool and maybe some of you
out there already know it.
I want to be the last guy to the party on this one but I just found out I just found this
and it was really very interesting so what I'm talking about is oscilloscope music which
I think is kind of a misnomer, technically it goes through a vector scope which is a type
of oscilloscope and if I'm understanding it right it uses the deflection on X and Y axis
and this genius guy he figured out that he could use that to draw pictures.
Now obviously you can run audio through a oscilloscope and you get the waveform and it's
all cool looking and everything and you know for a long time there's been a lot of
visualization.
I remember back in 1998 when AMP it had a lot of visualization plugins that used waveforms.
Some of them were really cool.
Some of them had 3DS celebration, they used OpenGL and now all these trippy colors and
they're really really cool but this is definitely different.
I would say it's similar to that but what you will actually see is not just 2D but 3D
shapes and sometimes they're animated on the vector scope screen and they're being
drawn by nothing but sound and if you're listening to this I'm going to put in the show notes
and if you're listening to this on the go somewhere and you can't look at them right
now that's fine but you owe it to yourself to look at some of the links I'm going to put
in the show notes.
The first one is just a video of this so that you can see what I'm talking about because
some things you just have to see, my words cannot do them justice, the first video is just
a track of music being played through a software oscilloscope so that you can see the effect
it has.
The guy that made this, actually first I should say if we jump down to the second link that
is a link to the original tech mode video that first turned me on to this.
The guy at the beginning of the video builds an old oscilloscope and then he shows you
how to set it up for this sort of thing.
I'd never heard of this but after I saw that video I did some more research of course
because that's what you do right and I came across the video and this is the third link
in the list of the guy who partially created this or the method of creating this because
it's not what you think I promise, it's not just spaghetti noodles moving around the
screen.
There's some really intricate stuff that happens and you're going to really miss out
if you don't watch the whole video but this video of the guy who essentially created
this, he did it with Blender and I guess he figured out that when you run audio through
the oscilloscope of course it makes the waveform on the screen and there's a mathematic
principle behind that and he could reverse the process and by doing that he could draw
3D shapes and it would play the corresponding sound so you could essentially use that
to create music that would draw pictures on the screen, create 3D animated, just really
cool stuff and that's another thing that's really kind of interesting about this is that
it is music, it may not be music that you like but it is music, it does sound a little
bit like techno which I know some people feel that's just like a bunch of random noise
but when I say random noise it does sound like techno music, it doesn't sound like you're
1995 modem dialing up into AOL or anything.
So there's a video where he explains all that how he came upon this method of doing this
and then the next link is the YouTube channel for the guy who actually creates the music
and he's got a lot of videos there of the technique being demonstrated with a bunch of
tracks so this guy actually created an album and you can buy it on his website which
I'll also put down there for you, oscilloscopemusic.com, I don't think it's very much, I think
it's like 5 pounds or something but it's an entire album of musical tracks that you
can play through a vector scope if you have one and watch it do its thing.
If you don't have a vector scope there is a software oscilloscope that you can get,
I put a link for that too, it's cross-platform runs on Windows Mac and Linux, I think if you
run it on Windows 10 you might have to grab a DLL file but it'll let you play these
tunes through it and see the animations and the cool visualizations that it creates.
But he also has on YouTube I think there's most of the tracks are there if you want to
search for them, he's got them on his channel and you can see the music draw the sounds
on the oscilloscope screen, it's very very cool, it's something I had not seen, I'd
seen similar stuff like I said with waveform visualizations on Winamp and later of course
Microsoft, whatever it was, media player that they shipped with I think what was it,
7, version 7 and up had those built-in visualizations that weren't quite as good as the ones
that Winamp had.
So yeah I mean the technique isn't exactly new necessarily or the idea of it but it's
not quite the same thing because what you're going to see in the screens like there's
one of like a stick man riding a bicycle while the background which is like mountains
and stuff scroll by, probably the most intricate one is some 3D mushrooms that spring kind
of just out of nowhere they just grow up out of nowhere and it creates a like a mushroom
garden and there's a butterfly that flies through and it's animated, that one's really
cool, that one's a little tough to top, there's some other stuff to these Tetris blocks
that sort of move around and it's really cool, you just really need to see it, also just
for fun in the show notes there's, I found just looking up stuff about oscilloscopes, I
found a guy who figured out how to run video through an oscilloscope screen, I'm sorry I'm
very very tired, I've been up all night and finally just as an extra little fun thing,
there's a guy who's actually running Quake through an oscilloscope, I don't ask me how
he did that, that's really cool, he describes it in the show notes on his video but as with
a lot of things it's really hard to describe how cool these things are with just an audio
recording, you really need to be able to see them and if you see them I think you'll
probably be like me and want to see more, and if you already are into this or you're
somebody who is also creating a oscilloscope music, it would be great to hear from you,
I would like to hear more about this, it would be great if you recorded an episode and
describe in a little bit more detail how it's done, I know that like I said in the original
video when they were first creating their method of doing it, they were using blender, I
know that there's some other software that gets used to create the music but it's more
detail than I could really get into in just a single episode and it's not something
that I do personally but I found it's really interesting, it's something you should really
check out, all the links are in the show notes and that's about all I got for you today,
thanks for listening.
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