Cthugha (software)
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Cthugha is the name of a seminal computer program that "visualised" sound for viewing, often described as "an Oscilloscope on Acid". It was written in the mid-90's by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt, originally for the PC, and was later ported to other platforms. It was freely distributed and highly configurable and the visual output could vary to almost anyone's taste, becoming very popular to play in the background at parties.
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[edit] History
Cthugha was started by Burfitt in September 1993 under DOS for the PC [1], but not released to the public until version 2.0 in March 1994 [2]. It wasn't until release 5.1p in October 1994 [3] that popularity of the program took off; this coinciding with the relatively new availability of cheap sound-cards for PCs, such as the Soundblaster.
Cthugha was release for Linux ("Cthugha-L") in May 1995 [4], and for the Macintosh ("MaCthugha") in January 1996 [5]
In 1994 Cthugha was used heavily in the music video for the top-40 song Dead Eyes Opened by Severed Heads. If you step through the video slowly you can read a "thank you" message from the band to Zaph scrolling through the background.
Cthugha was used as the video wall background for the Australian children's TV game show Challenger, hosted by Zoe Sheridan during the late 90's
Burfitt stopped work on Cthugha in January 2001, and there were various attempts by others to carry on the project, but by that time there were so many clones of the software that there was little enthusiasm.
[edit] Reaction
"It gives credence to the phrase 'I can see music'...There is no real way to describe the patterns except as weird". Australian PC Review, October 1994
"Wavy Data. Upon first observation, oscilloscopes seems a bit ho-hum. After all, devices that graphically represent electrical waveforms on a display screen tend to fall a bit short on the sex appeal scale. But if you spend some time exploring the ways high-end oscilloscopes can visualize data, you may start to think the machines are on drugs . . . Cthugha 5.1, an oscilloscope program for PC sound cards, has tuned in, turned on, and decidedly dropped out from the humdrum world of scientific analog signal processing. The product of Australian code jock Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt, Cthugha takes your sound card's CD, line, or microphone input and displays it as a swirling, hypnotic, 256-colour confection for your eyes. Although Cthugha currently requires MS-DOS, a VGA monitor, and a Sound Blaster or Gravis UltraSound sound card, the complete C source code is part of the package, so you can port it, if you're so inclined." HotWired, March 1995
"Cthugha has tuned in, turned on, and decidedly dropped out of the humdrum world of scientific analog-signal processing." Wired 3.03 (page 156), March 1995
[edit] Legacy
Cthugha is believed to be the forerunner – either in inspiration, or possibly even as source-code – of the numerous and varied "visualisation" plugins for mp3 players and media players on many computer architectures.
[edit] See also
- Cthugha - The mythical demon the software was named after.
