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Oscilloscope Drawing

Beamscan recreates drawing with an oscilloscope's XY mode inside After Effects, also known as oscilloscope music or oscilloscope art.

How it works

On a physical oscilloscope, feeding stereo audio's left channel into the X axis and right channel into the Y axis moves the beam according to the audio signal, tracing a shape. Points where the beam dwells become brighter, while rapid movement between coordinates leaves fainter lines.

Beamscan's Audio Waveform source reproduces this behavior.

Setup

  1. Import stereo audio designed for oscilloscope drawing, such as a WAV file, into your composition.
  2. Create a solid layer and apply Beamscan.
  3. Set Scan Source to Audio Waveform.
  4. Choose the audio layer with Audio Layer.
  5. Set Wave Mode to Lissajous (XY mode).
  6. Set Wave Window to 1000 / frame rate milliseconds. At 30fps, use approximately 33ms. This draws one frame's worth of signal at a time.

Adjust the look

Parameter Effect
Wave Dwell Controls brightness based on beam speed. Increase it for brighter dwell points and fainter connecting lines, as on real hardware.
Wave Gain Changes the size of the shape (signal amplitude).
Persistence (Animation) Adds phosphor persistence, leaving trails behind a moving signal.
Glow / Halation Adds phosphor bloom.
Graticule / Curvature / Edge Falloff (Screen) Creates the look of a measuring instrument with a graticule.

Conventional waveforms

Set Wave Mode to Scan for a conventional waveform with time on the horizontal axis, like an oscilloscope's YT mode.

Note

Audio is read from the layer's source item. Layer audio levels and time remapping are not reflected in the waveform as of v1.0.