Outwards from June – Report 2: Joshua Ellingson’s Oscilloscope Clips
Here’s a super fun project by Joshua Ellingson titled Oscilloscope Clips for April-May 2022, where oscilloscope art is combined with Pepper’s Ghost illusions (really makes me want to try it!!) Basically, oscilloscope art is produced using a oscilloscope which is playing oscilloscope music (explained further with links below). The display from the oscilloscope is then projected using the Pepper’s Ghost technique so that it looks 3-D and as if it’s a hologram dancing to music inside of a glass shell.
I’ve found a lot of ‘sound visualizers.’ The simplest, most home-made (or high-school-science-classroom-made) project I found is Sound Visualizer & Chladni Patterns Formed on a Plastic Bucket // Homemade Science with Bruce Yeany I’m not sure if this is technically an oscilloscope, but it is definitely visualizing sound waves in a similar way. I think that what’s cool about Bruce Yeany’s sound visualizer is that it’s hand-held and easy to make! He also just seems like a super chill, nice guy and explains how the science and the set-up work in a way that’s easy to understand. There’s this other guy, Steve Mould, who made a similar sound visualizing device, but for his device to work he needs to put a Bluetooth speaker in a bowl, which is a more expensive set-up, and requires all sounds to be visualized to come from that Bluetooth speaker (as opposed to being able to capture live sounds and yell into it, like Bruce does). Finally, there’ a super cool video about called This is Music On An Oscilloscope – (Drawing with Sound) which shows how you can use an oscilloscope to draw things with sound and explains that you can actually make music to be enjoyed as oscilloscope music! In the video the first show how a track called “blocks” looks through the oscilloscope and they explain that this kind of music is created to be both audibly AND visually interesting.
I think all these projects are super cool, but I would be interested in getting them to visualize or capture vibrations in the environment that are just below our level of audio perception. Thinking about ‘the music of the spheres’ for example, from the previous post, I’d be interested in having an oscilloscope display not only making the invisible (sound) visually perceptible, but also making the inaudible (at least to human ears) AND invisible perceptible.
As for the sources that inspired Joshua Ellingson for this project, he states that he’s learned about the work of Jerobeam Fenderson & Hansi Raber and their OsciStudio utilities. He got the oscilloscope from a friend.