As readers of my blog will know by now you can easily import any data into audacity and play it as audio. However, most data that you’ll import and then play will just turn out as noise. That is simply because there’s too much noise in the image i.e. too many colours and too much data. So, if you reduce the amount of colours and data in theory you get something a little bit more pleasing to the ear. Experimentationing time!
These were my initial two shapes that I worked with:
And the resulting sound, when looped a lil’ bit:
It’s not much but it shows definite potential. I’ve yet to work out how colour affects the sound, but I’m getting there
The next logical step is to of course run a glitched image through this process! I worked with this image for the sound then used ImageMagick to crop the image to 30x30px squares and used FFmpeg to arrange them into a video
It’s noise, but I like it 
![hellocatfood posted a video: [Warning] Contains lots of flashing](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4119/4908683008_78e25c4388_s.jpg "hellocatfood posted a video: [Warning] Contains lots of flashing")
11 Responses to “It’s Just Noise!”
i really like this actually, especially the first one; i wouldn’t be worried that one is either not much or the other is just noise – if you think in terms of your bent data being a single instrument, the output can be combined with other instruments – be they ‘traditionally’ sourced or more bent data – to produce a layer of sound that could be quite pleasing.
i’m definitely going to have a bit of a play with the technique !
Hi Antonio I love what you are doing here..! only just found you via @ragearts – “…how the colour effects the sound…” This seems very exciting – I mean the possibilities for making and linking images to sound/sound to image – good luck!
I saw this [ http://8bitcollective.com/music/hellocatfood/Oddly+Enough/ ] the other day and tried it tonight using slightly modified images from the ones on the link you provided and a few simple images.
After putting this image through audacity [ http://www.fumcuvalde.com/clientimages/33994/simple_rainbow.jpg ] I am seriously looking into this technique. It’s intriguing as to how audacity reads the raw file, though. After loading the rainbow image, the sound/wave form didn’t resemble the picture as I thought it would in terms of symmetry and/or congruence…
It’s all a bit tricky at the moment. I’m still trying to figure out how the colour, shape and size of the image relates to the sounds produced
Are you familiar at all with Lis Rhodes? The second video reminds me a lot of her film Light Music, where she put identical black & white geometric shapes on the visual and optical audio tracks of 16mm film.
This is the only video I could find of it: http://vimeo.com/4260483 (kind of terrible recording)
Interesting stuff.
The obvious next step I can see is to take a simple audio snippit and reverse engineer it back to an image.
That might give you some interesting insight or a path for exploration?
indeed – & a step after that could be transferring it back again, so you get a piece of audio which was turned into a picture which was turned back into a piece of audio (& vice versa) !
I’ve already used several similar techniques to convert audio to an image and I’ll let you know now that the result aint that pretty! Usually there’s just too much noise on a track and in turn that’ll get converted to an image.
So, unless your sound is very very clean and sharp you end up with just white, glitchy or otherwise very noisy noise.
For an interesting experiment try converting a single tone to an image. It makes nice patterns
exciting
i sent you an email
Hi Antonio
I’m doing a pop video soon for the 2 weeks to make it competition and wondered if you’d be up for helping me incorporate some databent images and possibly sounds into the video I make. The video to some extent will depend on what band I get paired with so will advise if you’re interested.
Best
Brendan
Hi Brendan, I’m interested in doing that! Just e-mail me more information when you get it