Reaktor oscilloscope showing the Youscope demo

August 23rd, 2007

I recently saw this wonderful wild demo, (Youscope by tvt) consisting of an audio file being fed into an oscilloscope. (If you don’t know what a wild demo, or even just a demo is, I suggest you read up on the demo scene. No further explanation of these concepts will be given here)
I decided to build my own oscilloscope in NI Reaktor and try it out. The result was not really satisfactory. For one thing, the blur works different on an analogue oscilloscope compared to how Reaktor’s blur is working. Also, Reaktor was not meant to work as a X-Y-oscilloscope. (However, displaying a graph with t on the x axis works fine)
The first video is the original video recorded by tvt, where the demo plays on an analogue oscilloscope. The second one is my Reaktor oscilloscope.


For those of you who are into Reaktor there are two things that you might be curious about. The first thing is what the wires to the sound output are and why they are there. Well, appearently, Reaktor refuses to unless evaluate the value from the sound input unless there are wires that also leads the events to a sound output. (This probably has to do with saving CPU cycles) I also put a multiplier that multiplies by zero to silence the sound, while still letting audio events through.
The other thing is the two things inside the structure that I move the cursor over. These are simply inverters. Because of my sound card (Or the way Reaktor plots data) the image got flipped both horizontally and vertically, and the inverters flip the image so the text in becomes readable.
The little thing in the end of my video is not from the demo actually, but from Herbert Weixelbaum’s Tanzmusik (From the 8-bit operators Kraftwerk tribute) which I though looked good in X-Y-mode. (;

One Response to “Reaktor oscilloscope showing the Youscope demo”

  1. ale/pepino says:

    Amazing! If only I’d known this stuff could be done, when I was in University…

Leave a Reply

If you'd rather contact me directly, please use the following e-mail address: It appears that you have Javascript disabled. Please enable it to see my e-mail address.