Looking for ways of using waveforms in my music videos

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I have an idea for a type of music video where you can clearly see the waveforms that make up the music and the whole thing is designed to look interesting as well as sound interesting. To do this I need some special implimentations of oscilloscopes which I fear may not exist. Perhaps an environment like Bidule or somesuch may allow me to build what I need. Here's the gist.

1 - I need waveform displays which update at the rate of the note - for example, so that a steady waveform appears steady, and changes in pitch look like expansions and contractions rather than looking messy on notes that aren't harmonically related to the update rate. There are two ways I can think of doing this - the first is using zero crossing and tends to be glitchy with complex waves - the second is to use a MIDI input to get the clock frequency direct from the part being viewed. Another way might be pitch detection but I've no idea how that works.

2 - I'd like to construct lissajous figures to show the relationship between a stream of two notes. This would need two waveform feeds and one would govern x movenent and one y. If you've not seen these figures, they show a geometric beauty related to musical intervals and are very beautiful.

This is a long shot but if anyone has any ideas I'd be extremely grateful to hear them :)
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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i know exactly what you mean
but i'm not aware of anything that would do exactly those things easily

basically you need an oscilloscope, and a way to get the "phase" from the synth being played, then use this phase to drive the horizontal sweep of the scope
this will result in 1 cycle of the synth output to be "locked" on the scope display, regardless of what note it's playing or how many harmonics or filters/resonance it has on top of it, or whether or not it has portamento going on

but that's too complicated

the next best thing i can think of is.. in SynthEdit there is a module "scope3" which has a "Time" input (it sets the time resolution)
you can use a midi2cv to convert the incoming note to pitch, then to frequency, then to time duration, so that to manipulate the scope "time" window to be equal to 1 cycle (or more) of the given midi note
that would work for monophonic operation
however, that module doesn't look too fancy

i love music as well as video and graphics processing, and i've also wanted to include some animation which reflects the music
i usually just use a normal oscilloscope/waveform display
it doesn't have to be "locked" .. even so, most listeners/viewers won't understand what they're seeing (tho it'd look fancy)

it's cool enough if you can find an old CRT oscilloscope and record a video of it displaying your music
that nice fluorescent green-ish color.. mmm :love:
It doesn't matter how it sounds..
..as long as it has BASS and it's LOUD!

irc.libera.chat >>> #kvr

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there is a new application for android/iphone called pixivisor by the creator of sunvox-
it works in the way that you transmit from one device to another.
what you transmit is an image or video which gets transformed into sound which you with the receiver pick up directly through the microphone of the receiver or with the input directly...
anyway if you would take videos or images of waveforms and transmitted them you could at least get a moving image with a really nice sensibility to it...
its not what you are looking for but it could be something useful...
Last edited by musical android on Tue Feb 12, 2013 6:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
Every man and every woman is a star.

http://www.musicalandroid.com/

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That free plugin, Smexoscope (not the exact name, but googling that should find it) Can do the first one in one of it's viewing mode if you play with the threshold of the sensor.

As for #2, no idea.

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Thanks for the suggestions! Smexoscope is an excellent tool but unfortunately quite limited in an artistic sense. I was going to call it "ugly" which isn't really true, it's just visually very plain.

IL's Wave Candy plugin has an excellent oscilloscope mode which lets you change the colours and other aspects of the wave which is exactly what I need, but I see no form of pitch detection or anything like that as far as I can tell. Using it's spectrogram modes on individual channels might be fun, though.

I might see how far I can get without pitch detection/synchronization. And I guess the lissajous figures are just out of the question unless I find a programming platform that I can get along with.

Here's a pretty good example on youtube of the sort of thing I'm aiming for!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWi4lH5Xdwk
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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musical android wrote:there is a new application for android/iphone called pixivisor by the creator of sunvox-
it works in the way that you transmit from one device to another.
what you transmit is an image or video which gets transformed into sound which you with the receiver pick up directly through the microphone of the receiver or with the input directly...
anyway if you would take videos or images of waveforms and transmitted them you could at least get a moving image with a really nice sensibility to it...
its not what you are looking for but it could be something useful...
I've seen that... It looks REALLY fun, especially the Monotron as Video Filter demo. I don't have one of those Iphone type gadgets at the moment but I've been thinking of getting something like it, if only for cool things like this and as a midi controller with touch surface.
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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Another option would be to use an After Effects template, many of them respond to audio and there's loads of free ones available.

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tho, square waves are not very interesting unless they have some filtering on them
and yes, oscilloscopes are generally not made to look "nice"
CRT scope IMO are nice, i tried mimicing one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL-Gb4q0uXw

as for a platform for visualising audio, if you happen to have WinAmp - it has a built-in visualisation plugin thing, that is kinda "modular" and you can create your own visualisations, specifically "SuperScope" and a few other are scriptable and you can make quite funky things based on the audio data
It doesn't matter how it sounds..
..as long as it has BASS and it's LOUD!

irc.libera.chat >>> #kvr

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Reminds me when I played tracker music in cubic player. That old DOS software had some different kinds of visualizations that crossed "midi" (tracker data) with waveform audio-data. At 0:26 there's a sample of oscilloscopes and at 0:46 there's notes jumping around with pitch/velocity mapped to different parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmkep5GN78E

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J-Scope is an oscilloscope VST I produced, which attempts to emulate a CRT-based scope. It can display Lissajous figures, plotting L v R or Mid v Side, if you can arrange your waveforms to work like that! It has various trigger settings which might help with your first requirement, but it would depend on the signal to some extent.
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tehlord wrote:Another option would be to use an After Effects template, many of them respond to audio and there's loads of free ones available.
Thanks for the suggestion. Though I've heard of After Effects I've never looked at it. I am hoping to get into video production as a way to make my art more immersive, so it's worth looking at.
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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antto wrote:tho, square waves are not very interesting unless they have some filtering on them
Blasphemy! Marvel at the elegant simplicity and symmetry of the square wave! Swoon at it's almost-but-not-quite 90 degree corners! Though I know what you mean :hihi:. Mostly I want to be using waveforms I've designed which *look* interesting and are modulated and fairly complex. Sync and ringmod looks very interesting on a scope, but these kind of modulations would probably throw off most scopes when it comes to syncing to the wave.

I've downloaded Winamp, I used to use it back in the day. Will have a look around to see if anyone has a good configurable scope, or maybe if I can program my own (though my programming skills are, in a word, "disorganized", lol).
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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larm wrote:Reminds me when I played tracker music in cubic player. That old DOS software had some different kinds of visualizations that crossed "midi" (tracker data) with waveform audio-data. At 0:26 there's a sample of oscilloscopes and at 0:46 there's notes jumping around with pitch/velocity mapped to different parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmkep5GN78E
Wow... Looks like a really cool tracker. Apart from that annoying background picture! I'm guessing it's a dosbox jobbie though.
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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kryptonaut wrote:J-Scope is an oscilloscope VST I produced, which attempts to emulate a CRT-based scope. It can display Lissajous figures, plotting L v R or Mid v Side, if you can arrange your waveforms to work like that! It has various trigger settings which might help with your first requirement, but it would depend on the signal to some extent.
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Wow, thanks! That looks really cool. Using L/R isn't a huge problem as I'm not really interested in stereo representations. I'll let you know if I have any luck with it.
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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here's some of my AVS presets for the winamp plugin, if they happen to work on a recent version of it even
https://www.box.com/s/7o2paow1hs56vp56tzs0
specifically with "superscope" you can code stuff per-dot and use waveform/spectrum data
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kryptonaut: nice, have to check that out
It doesn't matter how it sounds..
..as long as it has BASS and it's LOUD!

irc.libera.chat >>> #kvr

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