Sound engineer Jerobeam Fenderson has made amazing 3D mushroom landscapes using a whole lot of maths and an old analog Tektronix oscilloscope.
An oscilloscope is an electronic instrument that allows its user to convert sound or vibration signals into voltages, which are then plotted and displayed in a two-dimensional space. While they've mostly been replaced by modern digital instruments these days, oscilloscopes are used to measure how the charge of an electrical signal changes over time, and they record these changes as shapes plotted on a graph so users can analyse properties such as amplitude, frequency, rise time, time interval, and distortion at any given moment.
"Two channels from my audio interface (left and right) go into the oscilloscope, which operates in X/Y mode, also called lissajous mode," Fenderson says at his website, describing the process he used to create the mushrooms. "One channel causes horizontal deflection, the other one vertical deflection of the cathode ray."
Head to Fenderson's website to read an interview he put together using questions from Reddit, and be sure to watch his video above. It looks weird, and sounds a whole lot weirder.
Sources: Colossal, Jerobeam Fenderson's website