Lissajou Art

[Perfect Human Interface]

And someone is making software to convert 3D models into oscilloscope art! Apparently it's somehow even playable via MIDI.

Apparently some other guys are already much farther:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMli33ornEU

I hadn't even checked this link until now. That's amazing haha.

Is the software that was used to make the Lissajou sequences available? It might be adaptable if it is...

No idea. You'd have to do some googling to find out what might be currently available. I haven't taken the time to do so yet myself.

[aronb]

I have been watching this thread for a week now...

I wish I had better examples of my work - but my full time job and family have been my primary focus.
This is the only video I have of some work I did about a year and a half ago using Flowstone and custom output DAC's, etc....
This is only a simple non-choreographed proof of Flowstone module concept test !

https://youtu.be/gyHxtIjvFGo (Sorry for the poor quality of the video and audio)

Currently and slowly I am working on the modules which are digital versions of my original analog image creation systems.

About me (if anyone is interested )
I am an EE and have been working with lighting, lasers and x/y scopes (as well as audio products API, Tonelux) on and off since 1974 when I got my first surplus US Navy 0-scope. Working in the Atomic Physics lab in college I could not get over the beauty of the laser lab I was helping build when we would turn off the lights to do our spectroscopic experiments. The o-scopes and laser colors all over the walls was stunning to me - I am an artist at heart.

Much of the work I did was at one of the largest Laser Light Show companies (at the time late 1970's early 1980's) Audio Visual Imagineering as their R&D Design Engineer around 1984, where we did many laser shows for the next 30 years (till 2004) in both planetariums, corporate shows and festivals mostly in the US but some were done in countries around the world. All the equipment was custom starting with analog image synthesizers, while like audio synths are quite different. By the mid 1990's to 2000's the systems were all digital DSP type synths using Hypersignal Ride and TI DSP PC cards (see: http://www.ni.com/support/ride.htm). The laser scanning systems (servo systems, etc.) were designed and built by me as were many (but not all of course ) of the laser show performance consoles and recording equipment (16 channel FM Mod/Demod then we built 14 channel video tape PCM Encode/Decode systems) and at the time were state of the art... We had a few of the best engineers I have ever worked with. And so did a few of our competitors - I am still friends with them, but we have all gone our separate ways...

I can say we all worked many long hours to accomplish what we did back then. Recording all of this data was a major headache ! A side note is that one of our best engineers (who works in video now) developed our digital audio system and PCM Encode/Decoder, which went online in 1987, and enabled us to edit soundtracks digitally. The hard drive alone cost over $3000US and only enabled us to do about 45 minutes worth of digital editing, 650MB as I remember . And the system ran in DOS too, not Windows !... we only had a few CD's and they cost a fortune back then... we paid to rent CD's for show production as well !

I say all of this because we did many things similar to the things in this post and some in other posts as well and hope to share more as I can find the time. I really enjoy reading all of your new work... it is helping me stay young... well at heart anyway !!!

AV-Imagineering lives on as a small subset of its former glory and a few friends still work the.
see: http://www.av-imagineering.com/

The association we founded lives on as well. I was one of the founding members of the Technical Committee.
See: http://www.laserist.org/

I am doing work on laser image synths now only as a hobby, and so it is slow going but having used Synthmaker and now Flowstone for the past 6 or so years I LOVE IT ! Flowstone helps make this A LOT easier now days !!!

I love the support community here (you guys are really sharp) and hope to have something more to show in the near future !

Thanks for your help over the last few years too !

Now go have some fun !!!

Aron

[Spogg]

Wow Aron

Great to have someone here with your background and obvious expertise. If I got this right, you did your demo with FS modules operated by hardware controllers fed into a DAC which fed the X and Y axes of the scope...?

Are you aiming for a commercial output or would you be prepared to share your FS stuff for all to learn from and steal?
I would love to 'hear' your demo to find out how the on-screen visuals translate to stereo sound. If they aren't 'musical' it may be possible to sample sections and use them for percussion...

Me, I'm attempting to make stuff that is potentially musically capable and can display the stereo music stream directly on the X-Y screen, like the amazing ogg demo referenced before. There's lots of stuff for me to explore like blanking, frame sequencing, text and shape creation, MIDI automation recording and so on and I'm just a beginner at this, and with Flowstone.

BTW what was the music on the video? I'm thinking Dream Theater...

Cheers

Spogg

[BobF]

Hello aronb and all,

Aronb, that is truly amazing. From my first post I knew Flowstone could do this kind of art and much more. It just takes the right combination of oscillators, filters, ring mods, and etc., plus everyone trying new ideas. Do you still have your Flowstone schematics that you could share?
I really hope many more people join in on this art form using both software(of course Flowstone) and hardware. So far I have found Flowstone so much easier to use than the old hardware methods, but I have always gotten better art (so far) from the hardware. MAYBE if I can find the TIME I will drag out and set up my old hardware as a reference test.
Hope to see this keep going for a long time and more people joining in. Maybe some more posts on youtube showing what Flowstone can do for ART and MUSIC both. Everyone keep up the great work.
Later then, BobF.....

[Perfect Human Interface]

Cool... when I first saw this thread and BobF's original example I didn't even know what I was looking at. It was just coincidence that the kickstarter for the "oscilloscope album" suddenly showed up and one of the staff members at Image Line posted that video on their forums, and it kind of blew my mind.

I don't suppose anyone here is actually considering backing the kickstarter...? That 3D software would probably be a lot of fun to play with, whenever it's finished, but $100 is too rich for me right now. I guess here we like making our own anyways.

[tulamide]

Whenever you all need to take a break from developing Lissajou-art, you might find this a lot of fun.

Dancer is an application I wrote 4 years ago, as another approach to visualize audio. It wasn't done in Flowstone, so no schematic available. Also, it needs DirectX 9.0c, which you can download from Microsoft, shouldn't it be already installed (a lot of games still need it).

The heart of it all is a puppet. This puppet is not an animation or the like, but a physics simulation. It has body parts and joints, and imagine it having invisible strings. Those are directly connected to audio events (e.g. peak, correlation, rms, dr, etc., but no fft ), thus letting the puppet dance.

The left part is a High-Detailed-DR-Meter, the bottom serves as your control center. You can load audio files (via folder-icon-button), but I had no mp3 license, so only .wav and .ogg are supported. Ogg files will be fully expanded into RAM prior to playing, it may take a few seconds.
The two controls "Sensitivity" and "Activity" affect the way strings are pulled (to stay in the picture). This can go from almost no movement to going wild - so play with them.

I know this has nothing to do with lissajou - but in a wider sense, it is also about drawing through audio. So I hope you enjoy it

Dancer.png (124.72 KiB) Viewed 28397 times

Download here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11182740/construct/Dancer.rar

[Perfect Human Interface]

I would love to try my hand at making a visualizer for audio but I don't think Flowstone is up to the task unfortunately.

[Spogg]

Tulamide: That's so much fun! Brilliant.

I think it might be worth you starting a new topic with this, to throw down a challenge for the best 'stoners to use their skills to make music-based animation with FS. Maybe PHI is right and it can't be done. I think it could but I'm personally not up to it at the moment. I think much of it would need major Ruby skills.

Maybe do what bobF did and do a simple proof of concept first to whet the appetite...

Cheers

Spogg

[tulamide]

Tulamide: That's so much fun! Brilliant.

Thank you! Unfortunately, not many seem to enjoy it, so I guess, there's no interest in audio visualization via Flowstone.

[Spogg]

Thank you! Unfortunately, not many seem to enjoy it, so I guess, there's no interest in audio visualization via Flowstone.

In 7 hours 29 people viewed your post and many probably tried it. Under the 'General' forum group I posted a request for people to join in. As I see it, I think it's rude if you check something out, like it, then don't even say thanks.
Your lack of feedback has led you to believe there's no interest but I would say no feedback is the issue because this is very clever and fun software.

Cheers

Spogg