Crafting / collecting audio recordings that generate nice visuals

(not sure about the terminology I’m using here and in the title…suggestions/corrections welcome)

By feeding sine waves at frequencies around 50Hz (if you use PAL; that’s 60Hz if you use NTSC), or multiples of that, into the oscillators CV inputs of an LZX Vidiot (and other video synths, I guess) you can generate that move / wobble slowly, and/or in particularly interesting ways:

Small variations on the volume, the frequency or the shape of the sound wave will lead to changes in the patterns.

(here’s something we posted about this to the LZX forum in 2019, where we also received an enlightening reply)

We don’t have any audio synth modules in our setup so we started using old smartphones with a basic audio oscillator app in order to generate stable tones. Then we learnt how to use VCV (a free Eurorack simulator) which led to more complex audio waves, that generate more interesting visual patterns.

We attach to this post some recordings we’re currently using. Feel free to download/use them of course if you want to (I’m too lazy now to record videos showing exactly how they look)

1


generated by feeding the horizontal CV input with this audio signal:


2


generated by feeding the horizontal CV input with this audio signal:


3


generated by feeding the horizontal CV input with this audio signal:

We’d be curious to hear more from you about how you use this technique, check out your audio recordings if you have any, hear from those who use hardware audio modules in their video setup in the same way, etc…

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This batch of audio sequencies makes the wobbling effect change over time, in sync with a given BPM tempo.
We usually record these sequencies at different speeds (in the 118-135 BPM range). Here we only publish the slowest or fastest examples, please ask us for the other samples if you’re interested.

generated by feeding the horizontal CV input…

…or the vertical CV input…

…with this audio signal:


generated by feeding the horizontal CV input with this audio signal:


generated by feeding the horizontal CV input with this audio signal:


generated by feeding the horizontal CV input with this audio signal:

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