Oscilloscope Visualizer
Oscilloscope visualizer: trace a song's waveform across the frame as a glowing line, filled shape or dots, over black or your picture. Saved with the sound.
What does an oscilloscope show?
An oscilloscope draws a signal's voltage over time, as a line moving across a screen. Fed with sound, it shows the waveform itself: the actual shape of the air pressure the speaker makes. A pure tone is a smooth sine wave, a bass note a slow swell, and a full mix a dense, jagged line that shivers with every drum hit.
This tool draws that line across the frame, in the glowing green of an old lab scope or any color you like. It's the opposite view to the Audio Visualizer, which splits the sound into frequencies and draws bars.
How to use it
Start on a blank canvas or load a picture, then add a song. Until there's sound, a slow wave runs across the frame so you can set things up. Save as MP4 or WebM to keep the music in the file.
Amplitude is how tall the swings get, as a share of the frame, and Position is where the resting line sits. Stretch sets how many windows of sound cross the frame, and below 1 it zooms in on the wave. Style picks a line, a filled shape or dots, and Thickness sets their width. Glow adds a soft halo, and Opacity lets the picture show through.
Which preset should you start from?
Trace is the plain line. Filled fills the area between the wave and the resting line, which reads better at small sizes. Dots breaks the trace into beads. Low and wide moves the line near the bottom, at Position 0.8, and stretches it out, which leaves room for a title above.
Phosphor uses a pale green with a strong glow and a thin line, the look of an analog scope's screen.
Can it draw oscilloscope music?
No. Oscilloscope music, such as Jerobeam Fenderson's, is made for a scope in XY mode, where the left channel moves the dot sideways and the right channel up and down, so the sound draws pictures. This tool draws the waveform against time, the way a scope shows a single channel. For a ring rather than a line, the studio has a Waveform Ring effect that wraps the same wave around a circle.