Lissajous Pattern Record Grooves

The record would be parabola shaped. To cut it, a pendulum with a cutting needle would be set to swinging by releasing it from a position that exactly matches the release point on the player. It would go through the natural swinging patterns creating beautiful curves and patterns while the vibrating cutting needle imparted audio information to those patterns into this soft master disk.

Once the master is created, much harder playable records are cast from this. The record player has an exactly matching pendulum that's released from the exact same point as the cutting lathe so that it will approximate the lissajous pattern in its progression through the recording with slight deviations being corrected by virtue of it following the physical guide of the record notch.

Various patterns could be chosen as well by releasing the pendulum on lathe and player from different points with different approach angles. 4 or 5 choices would be available and the correct position would be marked on the record, although you'd quickly learn to recognize which pattern was cut into the record you're about to play.

Clearly very soothing music that would compliment the motion of the player would be a natural choice.

A more practical idea might be to adapt those swirly drawing contraptions like the one we played with as kids to a record player. Note, I believe the issue of interference with the path by having it constantly cross cut by subsequent passes would be to a large part due to the trajectory of the swinging player element but you might have to have the cut go continuously deeper from start to finish and the player pendulum similarly extend the needle deeper as it plays.

NOTE: This is one of those ideas that changed after writing it but I don't feel like going back and changing it. Have the machine in the first link be adapted rather than pendulum which has some issues. Although the pendulum would be relaxing to watch.

Ok, either of these approaches would work.