Sequences of animated Lissajous curves created electronically, in Hewllet-Packard wave forms generators as input to a Tektronics oscilloscope. The film is a honor to Jules Antoine Lissajous, a French physicist who made the first graphical representation of harmonic vibrating waves, around 1860.
Such scientist invented a system with two mirrors, each one attached to a mechanical vibrator. The mirrors were disposed in an orthogonal way such that each one moved in one axis, horizontal or vertical. A light beam were directed to the mirrors, then reflected in a plane, so resulting in special figures, as ellipses, circles, figure eights, named Lissajous curves, when obtained by such method.
The film was produced with three electronic wave form generators attached to the inputs of an oscilloscope, to reproduce Jules Lissajous’ mechanical experiments with electronic devices.
The wave form frequencies were chosen to be in the audible spectra, so were used as sound track also.
When both waves are sinusoidal ones and have the same amplitude and frequency, the resulting form is a static circle. If one amplitude is bigger than the other, the resulting curve is an ellipsis. If one frequency is twice the other, the the form is a figure eight, similar to a infinite symbol. Much more complex forms were obtained also by inputting a third axis, name z axis (actually not a third dimension, but a modulation of the curves) then producing traced, dotted and other kinds. If the frequencies are slightly unequal, the projected figure move slowly. The film was created as an experiment of random or controlled attributes of the waves, forms, sounds and intensities, then edited as complex sequences.