The @reaktorplayer twitter account provides a seemingly endless stream of fascinating links on music theory and technology. There’s also a reaktorplayer website covering “thoughts, research and experimentation with electronic music, art and photography.” A recent tweet linked to a PDF on the Digital Harmony of Sound and Light that covers, from a slightly different angle, some of the theory that also underlies the oscilloscope music of Jereobeam Fenderson, for example.

The ‘differential dynamics’ illustrated in the article reminded me of Jerobeam’s DC-offset examples and the rose curve patterns – of which there are some nice animations in the Wikipedia article – have some similarities with the figures I was recently playing around with (again following Jerobeam’s example) using the modified STS Harmonium. For interest’s sake, the difference between the harmonium shapes and Lissajous figures is that both signals (should one restrict the number to two) have a sine and a cosine output, whereas with the Lissajous patterns one signal has a sine and the other a cosine phase.

Last year I came across a fascinating lecture by Just Van Rossum in which he explores the The Sound of Shapes & Shape of Sounds. I finally got round to figuring out how to create those shapes myself with a little help from Hansi Raber’s OsciStudio coupled up with Blender. (There’s a nice video explaining how he got started with the whole thing.)

Hansi created OsciStudio as part of an oscilloscope music project together with Jerobeam Fendersen. Looking though some of his Max for Live patches I came across a little oscilloscope, and together with Ableton’s Operator synth could easily get some Lissajous shapes going. The ‘coarse’ frequencies in Operator follow the overtone series and one can set the phase relationship, so it’s easy to set up the Lissajous curves for different frequency proportions. Operator also has a wide variety of wave shapes that one can easily experiment with.

Following Just van Rossum’s idea of applying the Lissajous principles to letter shapes,¹ I used Blender to trace the outline of the letter S in three typefaces, and recorded the resulting waveform as generated by OsciStudio. Those soundfiles are then filtered with a little LFO sweep in Ableton Live which gets the letters to dance. That’s an Arno “S” in the video.

An Ableton Live Pack containing it all can be downloaded here.