This project is about translating old technology into a more visible and modern artifact, and was developed in collaboration with Maarten De Bruijn

The basic concept behind our project is to hack an old CRT-TV medium device to give it a music visualization purpose.

Nowadays we live in an environment where LCD screens are the most normal thing in the world. This new technology ensures that large and heavy CRT TVs have become virtually unusable.

That's why old CRT televisions are always lying around in thrift shops. You can buy them for very few euros or even get them for free. 

We wanted to give this old television-technology a new life  by giving it a new and visible purpose.

The creation of an image on a CRT-TV screen is caused by the electron beam technology. This technology creates electrons that are then emitted. These emitted electrons are colliding against a phosphor plate, what results into the emission of photons. Photons can create light and we humans ultimately experience this phenomenon as something visual such as seeing an image on a screen. 

The electron beam moves very fast (thousands of Hertz), so we perceive this image as a continue image, even if it is made just by one electron beam moving around. The beam is moved by a magnetic field generated trough two coils. This magnetic field is able to move electrons in horizontal and vertical directions.

In our hack, we unwired the two coils from the main circuit board. We wired them to the speaker output of an old amplifier. The idea is to move the electron beam according to the left and right signals of an audio signal. An audio signal is bipolar; it can be positive and negative. Because of this, it is possible to create an alternating magnetic field, which is able to deflect the electron beam. The vertical and horizontal movements of the electron beam are, in this way, controlled by the left and right audio channels of the input device. By doing this, we created an XY oscilloscope.

The installation can be experienced in two ways: Passive or Interactive.

Passive = Plug your smartphone, choose a song, play it and see how it looks like.

Interactive = Plug a Korg Monotron Analogue synth, play with it and see how the sound you make looks like.