Photo credit: Jerobeam Fenderson
Finding ways to visualise sound remains an obsession for many artists. Now it seems one musician has found what could be the purest method yet.
Austrian Jerobeam Fenderson has found a way of making music that, in turn, creates visual art on an oscilloscope. He is currently seeking Kickstarter funding to produce a whole album.
Plugging your favourite track into an oscilloscope will produce a mess of squiggles. But the musician and electrical engineer has worked out how to make music that produces artistic shapes, essentially creating a whole new artform.
As Fenderson says: "That's pretty much the closest possible correlation between image and sound."
"When mixing music you usually have several tracks, on which you use effects like filters or reverbs. However if you want the music to create a stable image on the oscilloscope, you can't play two sounds at the same time, and even the slightest application of effects would lead to unwanted artifacts.
"Therefore the whole approach of making music is different here. All aspects from composition and arrangement to mixing have to be considered at once, and for both audio and video at the same time."
He is planning to release a whole audio visual album available at the end of the year to stream on YouTube. And it's already proving popular, proved by having achieved most of the 10,000 Euro target already.