What if shapes could dance to music? The Oskar Fischinger Google Doodle lets you find out by creating your own “visual music” — clicking dots on a grid to compose looping animations that pulse and glow in sync with the sounds you make. Released on June 22, 2017, this interactive Doodle celebrates the 117th birthday of a man who invented the music video decades before MTV existed.
Oskar Fischinger was born in Germany in 1900 and trained as a violinist and organ builder before discovering film. In 1921, he saw an abstract animation by Walter Ruttmann and immediately devoted his life to “absolute cinema” — films where geometric shapes, colors, and movement tell the story instead of characters. Long before computers existed, Fischinger spent months hand-drawing and painting every single frame, then syncing them perfectly to music. His “Studies” series from the late 1920s and early 1930s are considered the world’s first music videos — they even ran in theaters with credits advertising the record labels.
When the Nazis labeled abstract art “degenerate” and denied him work permits, Fischinger fled to Hollywood in 1936. He worked on Disney’s Fantasia, designing the famous Bach “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sequence — but quit without credit when Disney altered his pure abstract designs to include representational images like violin bows. His 1947 film Motion Painting No. 1, where he photographed every single brushstroke as he painted, won the Grand Prix at the Brussels Experimental Film Competition and is now preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress. Pete Docter, director of Pixar’s Monsters Inc., called Fischinger’s work “a different language I didn’t know existed.”
The Doodle captures his philosophy perfectly. You get an 11×16 grid where each dot represents a musical note. Choose from four different instrument sounds, click dots to place them, and watch your composition loop endlessly as animated shapes dance across the screen. There’s even delay and bitcrush effects hidden in the settings. As Fischinger himself said: “Music is not limited to the world of sound. There exists a music of the visual world.”
How To Play Oskar Fischinger Doodle
- Click any dot on the 11×16 grid to add a note — each column plays in sequence from left to right, each row represents a different pitch
- Choose between four different instruments using the icons at the bottom of the screen
- Your composition loops continuously, so you can keep adding and removing notes as it plays
- Click the gear icon to access settings including tempo, effects (delay, bitcrush), and preset compositions for inspiration
- Share your creation using the share button — each composition gets a unique link you can send to friends
