S&S w9 Fun with sound

A colleague pointed me to the album of Joy division – Unknown Pleasures on which sound waves are depicted. that is why I came across an article by Adam Cap that investigated the origin of the image. .https://adamcap.com/2011/05/19/the-history-of/

Is it possible to play te sound of an image can you make an image of soundwaves. If the image is something like the album than yes you can. I nowhere found a way to make export sounds to a collection of pixels in the way it would create a kind of image.

I did some testing on making a picture into sound an I

wrote about it. Now the progress. I finished transforming every row of this image into a Raw files that I than opened in Adobe audition to convert it into sound. In total it is a 12 minutes.The sound is not easy to the ear.

Looking on the internet I found a really amazing article and video on this subject by Patrick Feaster. The two links to go there. The software he discribes is still there but since I don't have a normal PC I can't do a thing with it.

https://griffonagedotcom.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/how-to-play-back-a-picture-of-a-sound-wave/

https://www.dust-digital.com/feaster/

Searching further I came on a side where I could upload an image and play the sound of it as you can see on the small movie I made of it. How you can tweak it to your own tast.

https://ojack.github.io/PIXELSYNTH/

Very cool is that you can draw lines in the image to change the sound.

Then I found the free phone app PhonoPaper by Alexander Zolotov and was hooked for hours. Not only could I use the camera on every photo to get sound from it but it is also possible to record sound and export it to a kind of lines as you see below. I made it a gif. If you hold the app in front of the computer you will hear sound. The speed in which I have to play it I don't know yet. Tried different speeds. This one is 25 frames a second.

When you download the app and hold it still if front of the screen then yo will hear sound. It is suppost to be a song.

Lets take the same inage as I did before and hear how it sounds. Again you could use the app and try it yourselves but I also made a small movie to show you. Off course you can alternate in speed and closeness.

One of the images I used

The movie to see how it works.

These are 12 tracks of 10 seconds recorded with the photopaper app from the sound that I have taken from one photo. So 10 seconds every minute. I then stuck them together in Photoshop. The problem is that the sound is so high that my dog rages when I play it. But it makes a nice image to see.

Here you see the seperate images. One for every 100 seconds placed together in one document. I can imagine this on a wall of a gallery. Then you can walk by with your phone and hear the explanation.

To build a kind of landscape I exported a 50 lines together to be a sound and then placed them in After effects underneath each other. The lines on top blue for the air, the ones in the middle green and yellow for plants and the one at the bottom darker brown and green.

Here some of the lines are made into dots

Conclusion;

I had a friend make sound for an exhibition ones for me ones. Then it was intended that you did not hear the sound until you were a little longer in the room making it stand out. Consider the sound of drops of water. The space in which my exhibition was then hung had been completely darkened and all 33 photos were illuminated with a small lamp due for miniature train construction. The only text you occasionally heard was "you should not walk in darkness".

For the rest I have always stayed far away from sound. As a child I have been deaf for a few years. At least from my 3rd to 6th birthday, but maybe earlier. That is why I now miss a number of tones. However, this handling of sound is visual and therefore I do not have to be able to hear clearly. I myself am very enthusiastic about this path that this project has now taken.

I never before did much experimenting with sound. I am really intrigued by the history told bij Patrick Feaster because the way those old documents look and he let us hear them. Never new that I could translate lines and images into sound this easy and I think it is a way to engage people in exhibitions.