Freesound Forums

I can see you launching a whole brand of retro lampshades, sofas, carpets, wallpapers...
Colours would probably be shocking pink, electric blue and leaf green rather than greyscale. ( - you would need sunglasses in order not to go blind staring at them !!)

Seriously, now. Well done. I have listenned to the sounds you have upoaded so far and they are great.

Once we have built up a few sound samples created from images, I will make a music track with them to celebrate.

Just posted a big sample containing various sounds which I am quite happy with.
This was what I had been trying to do all along: obtain "musically pleasant" sound processing in a graphics editor.

As I am processing all images as 256 grayscale pics (8 bit) I had to convert my sound to 8 bit first.
When importing, it is best to have the picture width as a multiple of the wavelenght (pitched sounds will then show a clear pattern and processing will have more musical results).
Although I agree the procedure I use to process sounds in a graphics editor is not a practical one, I think it has some creative potential.
Next step will be to explore the advanced filters in Paint Shop... Stay tunned.

Here is a sample that contains an unprocessed sound and several versions of it after processing in Paint Shop Pro.
Details of each of for of processing applied ot the sample are on the description.

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=83291

Those are interesting results. I would've expected one with jpeg artefacts to be a little more noisier, but it depends on the compression of course.

I have added some more of my experiments too, one with a 440 Hz tone, different waveforms, as described earlier. And one made from a photo.

Ah, yes. I have heard you latest uploads.
The fact that they are tuned to 440Hz or very close will make it easier to use them in a musical composition together with other sounds.

You might want to have a look at HighC as well

http://highc.org/

Benboncan wrote

You might want to have a look at HighC as well

http://highc.org/

nemoDaedalus wrote:

I also found one online in a Java applet, see [link]. It also works like AudioPaint, bottom is low frequency, top is high frequency. White is louder and black is less audible.

Guys, thanks for the links!
The Java applet is really cool. Need to browse the site or maybe contact the author to find out if I can play around with the applet while recording the soud output for posting at Freesound.

Also looked at the The HighC program link. This will take some time to explore. Graeat possibilities !

Thanks again, mates!

hey guys,

try pixelation and blur. I remember they really ruled when I was still messing around with this

- bram

Hi bram,

Thanks for the tip.
I have tried pixelation in the past (many, many years ago) and I am sure to try it again now that I am using images as sound sources again. (A link to a full music piece made with these sounds will appear at some point in the forum ).

In any case, just wanted to point out that if you make the image widht on import a multiple of the wavelenght then the sound picture makes more sense and the graphic effects should produce more musical results.
In Paint Shop Pro, the 'pinch' and 'punch' effects (shrink or expand the centre of the picture) produce FM (frequency modulation) type effects to your sound. Stretching a picture to 200% produced a reasonable audio streching effect (longer sound, same pitch) with not too many artifacts.
Check this sound for examples:
http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=83291

I have been doing tests on the wavelengths (measured in bytes). The problem is, for 44100 Hz, the waves don't fit. Only middle A, 440 Hz can be done quite precise.
I wrote a little php script to help me calculate the values, for the middle octave, wavelengths are:
C4 - 168.5615 bytes
D4 - 150.1712
E4 - 133.7874
F4 - 126.2785
G4 - 112.5013
A4 - 100.2273
B4 - 89.2923
C5 - 84.2808

For A4, you can multiply the wavelength with 22, to get exactly 2205 bytes. So in 2205 pixels, you can put exactly 22 waves of 440 Hz.

I'm also currently working on several images with more accurate gradients, which can be used with the method of waveshaping using GIMP's Curves function to create more exact frequencies.
Here's one already, which is exactly 440 Hz with a length of 1 second in 44100 Hz, 8 bit:

http://s4.postimage.org/R4kwS.jpg

Note it's a png, so when using it, convert it to your favourite raw format.

I found Baudio (through http://www.lilyapp.org/ , which was pointed at on irc.freenode.net#opengameart)
It converts any file to a wav file and back.

That looks cool, I'll check it out.

I recently found another way of converting images to audio. It exists since the 1950s or so, but it's still popular amongst radio amateurs. It's even used on the International Space Station to send images to Earth (though I suppose they have some better ways of getting images down in a higher quality format).
It's called SSTV: slow-scan television. Rather than simply converting image data directly to audio, like we've been doing, different lightness values have different audio frequencies. So a black line consists of a tone of 1500 Hz, for example, where a white line would be 2300 Hz. Colour is encoded in a similar way, but it all depends on the format chosen.
This makes it very robust, I've done tests with images and mixed music in with it, and I only got minor noise. Also changing the volume envelope of the sound over time has no direct effect, after all, that doesn't affect the frequency.
Some image slanting may occur though, but most software can fix that.
Anyway, since this is so popular, there are computer programs that can encode and decode the images and sounds in realtime, so we don't have to go through the hard work of converting everything ourselves
I've just uploaded one image, it's going through moderation now. I'll post the link here once it's available.

It's now available: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=103221

That's looking good, too bad it's all for pc
And you're welcome, I'm glad you find it interesting. Just something I came across while researching something completely different. That's how serendipity works

a lot of music progams come with similar things tools. Creating images into audio. I totally forgot about this-it was really popular late 90's.

toiletrolltube
Sorry, didn't realize you were using a Mac.

can you suggest any program for windows 7

AlienXXX
Here is a sample that contains an unprocessed sound and several versions of it after processing in Paint Shop Pro.
Details of each of for of processing applied ot the sample are on the description.

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=83291