Ted Davis is an artist and educator based in Basel, teaching creative coding at FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Switzerland. In 2017 he released XYscope, a Processing library that converts vector graphics to audio signals capable of driving the electron beam on an oscilloscope to draw shapes. In 2025 he ported the system to the p5.js ecosystem, building XYscope.js from scratch so that oscilloscopes can be live-coded directly from a web browser via P5LIVE. The engineering is precise: a circle is a pair of sine waves 90 degrees out of phase; a line is a custom wavetable; a rectangle is four frequencies. Every stroke you draw is simultaneously a sound. Every tone you hear is simultaneously a trace of light.

The remainder structure of this work is a triple domain crossing. The signal departs from code (digital coordinates), passes through sound (Web Audio API oscillators with custom wavetables), and arrives at light (an electron beam tracing phosphor on a cathode-ray tube). At each domain boundary there is translation loss and translation gain — artifacts that belong to neither the departing nor the arriving domain. They are the remainder of the crossing itself. The Cartesian separation between image and sound collapses here: the graphic does not represent the sound, nor does the sound represent the graphic. They are the same signal manifesting in different media. This identity is itself an unnamed aesthetic position.

The chisel-construct cycle of the oscilloscope deserves attention. The oscilloscope is the core construct of 20th-century measurement engineering — an instrument for visualizing electrical signals. Its aesthetics (phosphor afterglow, trace decay, analog warmth) were never designed; they are byproducts of the measurement function, remainder outside the engineering purpose. When XYscope.js converts the oscilloscope from measurement tool to creative medium, it performs a chisel-construct reversal: the foreground of engineering (accurate signal reproduction) becomes background; the background (the persistence of phosphor glow, the analog deflection of the electron beam) becomes foreground. Simultaneously, the oscilloscope itself is becoming e-waste — remainder of the consumer electronics upgrade cycle. XYscope.js creates new aesthetics on dying hardware, adding a temporal dimension to the remainder.

There is a deeper structural layer: additive synthesis. Multiple XYscope.js instances can be patched into the same audio output, their waveforms interfering with each other. The visual result is neither shape A nor shape B — it is the remainder of their collision. This is beauty at the physical level, unpredictable. Tiny differences between frequencies (say 50Hz and 50.1Hz) cause shapes to slowly drift, rotate, breathe, producing a quality of motion that no digital renderer can replicate. This quality was designed by no one; it is the mathematical interference of two wavetables. It is pure remainder.

The naming gap is wide. XYscope.js is not a music composition tool (it does not produce music in the traditional sense), not a visual art tool (the output is not on screen), not installation art (it runs in a browser), not video synthesis (pure vector, no raster), not sound art (sound is not the purpose), and not creative coding (the output is not on a digital canvas). The word "oscillographics" exists within a small community of practitioners, but the art world, the music world, and the design world have no prepared position for this practice of triple-domain identity. The logic is still growing.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics