AmateurRadio.com

The other day I was pottering around Facebook and stumbled across an amusing story via BBC News I think about a young couple who had decided to set themselves the challenge of visiting every one of the over 2,500 railway stations across Britain. I later discovered it’s connected to a Kickstarter project and has a website http://allthestations.co.uk. Reading some of the comments to the video – always a risky activity – I discovered a reference to the videos made by Geoff Marshall (of the same couple) exploring the secrets of the London underground and another youtube video – via https://www.youtube.com/user/geofftech2 – where he talks about cassette tapes. He also has a website at http://geofftech.co.uk.

In the comments to this clip there were a number of pointers to another youtuber who focuses on old analogue technology called ‘Techmoan’ – https://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan. One of the first videos of his I watched featured what Techmoan described as his holy grail of 1970s consumer electronics – something that featured both Nixie tubes and an oscilloscope to visualise the music – a bizarre old silver SAE hi fi amplifier you can see on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkCIdufSGS8.

About half way through the video he demonstrated the way the small oscilloscope worked. Normal music resulted in an animated but pretty fuzzy trace jumping about the screen. Then he put some different audio into the amp and the oscilloscope which resulted in regular geometric images appearing on the small screen. Quite amazing! I was aware of the neat regular waveforms that can be created with different frequency ratios on the X and Y plates. The Australian ABC’s logo was created by using a 3 to 1 ratio many years ago. But what I was seeing on the screen was lightyears beyond that.

He got a lot of comments pointing him to resources on oscilloscope music and a follow-up youtube video had pointers to a number of clips and sites, most notably Jerobeam Fenderson’s site at http://oscilloscopemusic.com.

You can view a number of his pieces on his Youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/jerobeamfenderson1.

Techmoan also provided links to an Oscilloscope Emulator for Windows, Mac & Linux https://asdfg.me/osci/ which works on my Mac and a Reddit Oscilloscope Music Page https://www.reddit.com/r/oscilloscopemusic/ with further links and info about this bizarre art form.

Jerobeam Fenderson also offers a program to create oscilloscope music called OsciStudio via his website.

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