Lissajous Fun 01

In 1970-71, at SUNY Albany, encouraged by the filmmaker / video artist Tom de Witt, I began experimenting with putting the output of the Moog synthesizer through an oscilloscope, making "Lissajous figure" graphics with it. I eventually made a piece with it, and several years later converted it to video, but I can only find a couple of stills from that piece - where the video master is, and how recoverable it is, I don't know. However, John Dunn's Artwonk 4.0 has a Lissajous module, so one can make real-time animated Lissajous figures with the program. After 37 years, I can return to using a technique I liked way back when. This short piece is an example of that. The soundtrack is also produced by the Lissajous module. I took 2 stills from the video, converted them to sound with Rasmus Eckman's free "Coagula" program, and then put those into Camel Audio's Alchemy softsynth. I time-stretched them, and played a sequence of microtonal clusters with those sounds, and recorded that. So although sound and image are not in sync, they come from the same source. This piece is also an experiment to see how "fine-grained" computer graphics will look when compressed and put on YouTube. And although a large format version of this projected on a big screen in a darkened room would undoubtedly show more detail, I'm quite happy with the way this "lo-fi" version of the image comes across here!

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Warren Burt
• Lissajous figures
• video synthesis
• graphic music
• video art
• computer graphics
• ArtWonk
• Coagula
• Camel Audio Alchemy
• mathematical visualization