picture to sound

[deadmichaelp]

does anyone any effect that does this kind of job? and how the hell can this be done? Somewhere I had read that people like Aphex Twin who use this method have actual hardware devices that do the trick... is this true? I think that there is a vst instrument that can actually do that but comparing to hardware devices is there anygood?

[bitcrusher]

Here's the three I know:

UI Software Metasynth (macintosh app, very powerful)
Coagula
FL Studio BeepMap
Camel Audio CA-5000 with import util

Aphex Twin likely used the first....

[Meffy]

Cameleon 5000 does it one way, using an image as a map of an additive synthesis patch; other programs might have other methods. Give Cameleon's demo a try. It's one of the best VSTis out there, truly different and good for hours of creative fun.

[deadmichaelp]

thanks for the info... but how can this happen? how can an image be converted to sound? for example, even though I don't think that is works that way but, what's the image a bass sound? or what colours give us a bass sound?

[FaX]

Here's the three I know:

UI Software Metasynth (macintosh app, very powerful)
Coagula
FL Studio BeepMap
Camel Audio CA-5000 with import util

Aphex Twin likely used the first....

You missed DiscoDSP's Vertigo which can import .bmp's of any size also .........

I wouldn't know from Adam which of those was best on a PC.
Metasynth is on V4 and apparently the proverbial dogs bollocks.

[Meffy]

To simplify, Cameleon uses the bottom-most row of pixels in a monochrome bitmap to control how much of the fundamental frequency to use at each moment of the duration of a note, in sequence from left to right across the image. The brighter (or darker? I forget) a pixel is, the louder the fundamental will be at that moment.

The rows from the bottom up control multiples of the fundamental frequency, letting you vary the harmonic content of the note over time. And noise gets in there too, but I haven't done this for a while and forgot. =^_^=

So, to do a bass sound, most of your "loud" pixels would be in the bottom-most rows of the image. The more pixels appear high up, the more open and clear the sound will become as more harmonics are added in. Oh, and the volume envelope of the sound over time is represented by the distribution of pixels from left to right.

I probably got a detail or two wrong but that's the basic idea. Coagula interprets color data into musical terms, IIRC, but I don't remember how it encodes timbral info into color.

Finally, to really see how it's done, get some demo versions. Nothing like paws-on experience to show you how something works.

[dystonia_ek]

Coagula interprets color data into musical terms, IIRC, but I don't remember how it encodes timbral info into color.

You can set it up yourself to interpret in specific ways.

[tk421]

This is from FL Studio's Beepmap: "Any color can be seen as a combination of red, green & blue components and any sound can be seen as a combination of sine waves with different frequencies.

BeepMap, like any other stereo image synth, will translate red color into the amplitude of a sine wave on the left channel, & green color into a sine wave on the right channel. As a result, yellow will sound equally on both channels.

The frequency of each sine wave depends on its vertical position in the bitmap.

Optionally, the blue component will be used to define the frequency range per pixel."

Once I understood how it worked, I could kind or predict how something might sound if I painted it in Photoshop. Beepmap may work differently from other similar plugins.

[Meffy]

Interesting variety of ways to handle translating. tk421, I know what you mean -- I got where I could make Cameleon sounds to order using PS. :-) Well, semi-to-order anyway.

[ugo]

dopplemangler can do this too.
it can also export bmp's from a sound you've created so you can edit it in a paint program...then bring it back into DM.

-ugo

[deadmichaelp]

nice...I'll see what I could do with FLStudio at the moment. Thanx.
I found an interesting page about this picture to audio thing.
http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php

[cyanogen]

Wow! That article was pretty cool. I'll look into this Coagula program. I don't write IDM, however...

I think Edirol is coming out with a hardware device that converts pictures to sound. I hate to think what the price tag will be, though.

[Har]

I've manage to get some really wild sounds and textures using this stuff:

http://www.webcenter.ru/~vsoft/BitmapPlayer.htm