[XCSSA] Youscope

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

>
> As for the original demo, it's interesting, but being able to  
> distribute it as a .flac file somehow makes it seem less cool. It  
> might be interesting to compress it to MP3 (with joint stereo both  
> on and off) and see what difference it makes.
>
>  - Bruce -

It would be interesting to see what happens.  I'm going to try the  
original big file on my scope.  It's pretty amazing how the author  
gets all those characters, blizzards, and other graphics.  I know  
those sorts of things are possible (on a 2D vectorscope), but would  
take a lot of work.  The lissajous patterns are pretty  
straightforward, or at least most of them.  It must be mostly or  
entirely coded for 2D vector display.  Even the parts that look like  
oscilloscope display are probably created from a vector  
display...making them fairly tricky to create also.

MP3, of course, is not intended to preserve complex waveforms on an  
oscilloscope or vectorscope (it can only do that for simple  
waveforms), but to make something that *SOUNDS* like the original,  
given the nature of human hearing, which has several masking  
mechanisms.  Also, we have a limited ability to "attend" to things.   
We generally direct our attention to just one thing at a time.  Stage  
magicians also take advantage of that limitation.  So if there's lots  
of stuff going on in an auditory signal (as there usually is) the low  
level bits are left out.  You get the loudest signals in the  
transform, but not much else.

I'd bet MP3 will have serious impact on the characters and blizzards,  
but generally keep the simple waveforms intact.  The simple lissajous  
patterns _might_ be OK, but I wonder about that because MP3 doesn't  
necessarily preserve all phase information.


Charles