Jerobeam Fenderson’s magic mushrooms will make you trip. But you don't have to eat these fungi to get their mesmerizing effects---just watch, and let them dance and multiply in front of you. Look, I’m not on shrooms. You’ll see what I mean:
Those intricate patterns are created with a piece of little-known, decades-old analog equipment: a cathode ray oscilloscope. For the uninitiated, an oscilloscope is an electrical instrument that measures changes in one or more signal voltages and then visualizes it as a two-dimensional plot over time. Input a non-electrical signal---like sound or vibration---and the oscilloscope converts them into visual voltages. That's how Austrian musical artist Jerobeam Fenderson (real name Christian Ludwig) creates his electronic "oscilloscope music," making waves on Reddit and YouTube in the process.
Fenderson started messing around with oscilloscopes as a teenager, while he was an apprentice at the electronics company Heidenhain, and soon started using his own music to experiment with them. The underlying method behind Fenderson’s oscilloscope compositions isn't too tough to understand: He connects an old analog CRT oscilloscope (a Tektronix D11 5103N) to a computer's audio interface. Sound that runs through the left audio channel comes out as horizontal deflections onscreen, while sound in the right channel shows up as vertical deflections. (If you look carefully, you can see the x and y axes as black lines running through the display.)
When Fenderson programs the sound correctly, he can create specific shapes and animations---from something as simple as a circle, like in the video above, to something wildly more complex, like a butterfly hovering through a field of mushrooms. More often than not, Fenderson uses the oscilloscope animations to complement to his electronic music---not to create any one image. Input any music into an oscilloscope and the results would be pretty abstract, but the trippy visuals work particularly well to show off Fenderson's minimalist, almost Indian raga-like electronic music. Case in point is his song "Nuclear Black Noise":
Fenderson usually starts from scratch and forms the audio and visual parts of his work with equal meticulous attention. But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. His “Khrang” video started with an existing illustration from a tutorial on drawing manga---you can see it emerge first around 20 seconds in. Working backwards, Fenderson rebuilt the image mathematically in visual programming software to control its expressions.
The work hasn't just been another instance of internet fame; Fenderson has played live shows across Europe using his oscilloscope music---with visuals and all---and they've been well received. He's currently working with a mathematician and programmer named Hansi Raber to develop software that will allow the two to create all kinds of images on an oscilloscope. "Producing different images is not so difficult once you know how it generally works," says Fenderson, "but making them sound interesting and musically applicable is a different story."
For example, Fenderson likes drawing objects based on spirals: "It gives me a lot of sound design options, like frequency modulation, and to an extent, additive synthesis," he says. With the new software, he'll try to expand beyond simple tropes like spirals and pair up more sounds with more images. Eventually, that pairing will help Fenderson pull off an entire audiovisual album, à la Beyoncé---using the "Khrang" video as a model. "I think the more interesting challenge is to try and make tracks with rather conventional harmonic and rhythmic structures that still make awesome visuals on the oscilloscope," he says.
Fenderson plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign soon to raise money for the album, and roll out teasers to stir some hype. No indication yet what it will sound (or look) like, but psychedelic wouldn't be a bad guess.
