I’ve seen on YouTube a visual oscillator at a few trade shows. This one called the Pfrsilator LoFi Video Oscillator is exactly what i’m looking for. Reaper has a lot of new video effects maybe we can direct feed that real time? hmm… ideas appreciated.
Someone else can give you more details, but I’m fairly sure that video synthesis is way too processor intensive.
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It’s quite doable if you do it with pixel shaders on the GPU. Check out Lumen or Vsynth. Not a full substitute for the tactility or immediacy of hardware, though! It’s a bigger gap than the one between audio hardware/software, IMO. But it’s also a bigger cost savings.
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I looked into doing a package of analog style video modules for Rack. But to do it justice you’d need a completely separate shader-based calculation engine. If Rack ever adds full engine substitution in plugins I’ll do it.
(If you wanted to output an NTSC video signal that arose from an entire patch, as opposed to a single audio->video module, using the current Rack engine, you’d need to run it at a 6-10Mhz sample rate.)
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I’m not too sure what a video oscillator is but if it’s music visuals you want have you seen VSXu? It’s open source etc.
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Another one, from Josh Dickinson of Unfiltered Audio: https://echobit.myshopify.com/products/viz-must-visualization-software
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Are we talking about a software version of something like this:
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No its an oscillator that gets its sound FROM the video - its not a nice video effect that follows along with the sound. So you want to change the sound you adjust the video parameters. I’ve yet to see one actually adjustable apart from the vcr tracking head and tape speed. There are some big voltages involved messing with real Tube TV stuff so i’d like to think this would be a digital osc with the huge amount of first gen LCD tv’s coming offline in the near future.
Thoughts?
the only things coming to mind here are that Bidoo module that took an image and made sounds out of it and, uh, okay, this is probably irrelevant but Mercury Rev? Like, in there early days I remember Grasshopper talking about plugging guitars into old tube TVs? I could probably unearth the interview but it was on in a magazine.
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Almost like what Erica Synths and Gamechanger Audio are doing with the Plasma distortion - finding something new to make the noise 
The key is we don’t have to go do it we can be the Simulacra to the Simulation itself! Making Baudrillard happy we make it in VCV before the real thing comes out!! (ps. time for some coffee to damp last nights 420 I think its still affecting me).
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This “Pfrsilator LoFi Video Oscillator” seems to be a (fully analog) video synthesizer, exactly like the LZX Vidiot. They probably share a few basic features because the results are comparable and similar. Video synthesizers have 1 or more video oscillators.
I don’t think the Pfrsilator emits any sounds; those that do, like the 3TrinsRGB+1c, are called audio/video synthesizers.
I’ve been playing with a LZX Vidiot and some more video equipment for a while, if you have any questions I’m happy to tell more (in another thread, Lounge category, I guess).
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The modular video synthesis world is growing quickly due to great efforts by LZX. Vidiot is a really well designed semi-modular video “instrument”. I really like Lumen too.
I dream of a day when video and sound synthesis are both integrated into Rack. I would certainly be willing to pay for video modules.
The high frequency rates required for analog video output seems out of reach. I think the ability to output to a second screen and record audio and video to a video file would be more than thrilling!
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Check nature osc https://warmplace.ru/soft/nosc/
Takes a webcam feed and generates sound. I route it into VCV via jack, typically using Entrian envelope follower, it allows the tree outside to modulate stuff when the wind blows.
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Great idea! Pixivisor from Warmplace is worth checking out too.
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you can certainly do that in touch designer, and talk to it via audio routing/osc, you convert your video (top) to channel information (chop) - then you can do all kinds of math with it to sculpt your sound.
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