Photosounder

Photosounder is a spectral editor/synthesizer with an entirely image-based approach to sound creation and editing. It allows you to transform any sound as an image and to create any possible sound from an image. It is the ultimate bridge between the graphical world and the audio world, bringing the full power of image editing to the service of creating and transforming sounds. Powerful built-in image editing tools, some yet unknown to general image editing programs, are specifically tailored to enable you to create and edit sounds with ease in ways and with results simply impossible with other programs.

The immense possibilities offered by Photosounder are only starting to be discovered. Every day spent using Photosounder brings new discoveries, new kinds of sounds never heard before, new effects never approximated, new takes on classical effects or methods, all merely by combining the power of the simple set of tools built in the program.

Features

Analysis/Synthesis:

• Lossless processing of sounds based on images, so that real sounds can be transformed by transforming their image.
• Noise-based synthesis for synthesising original sounds from nothing or resynthesising wildly transformed sounds in a way that results in a continuous and smooth spectrum.
• Exclusive spectrogram analysis algorithm that natively operates on a logarithmic scale and can vary time/frequency resolution depending on frequency for a better clarity and a better resynthesis.
• Coming soon: Real-time live synthesis, allowing real-time time-stretching or to hear changes as they are made to the images.

Editing:

• Dedicated graphical editing tools best suited for editing or creating sounds, such as various sprays to enhance, suppress, erase or create features, including a harmonics modifier to apply all modifications to a frequency and its harmonics at once.
• Layer system similar to Photoshop's, with layer groups and various layer blending modes, including exclusive layer convolution modes.
• Extensive graphical/mathematical operations specially adapted to spectrogram editing which allow you to apply all kinds of effects, from the most common (such as EQ, compression, denoising...) to the weirdest (envelope reversion, spectral gating, pitch inversion, spectral quantization...).
• Processing in third-party image processing programs by exporting images to BMP files and importing of the externally modified images.
• Rhythm and note overlays to help with music composition.

History:

• Ability to restore a session, even after a crash.
• All actions are instantly saved to a history file in a human-readable language so none of your work is ever lost. Also allows you to edit the history by hand or save a project and all its history.
• Easy scripting to automate actions.

Uses

Photosounder can be used for image-based synthesis, spectral editing/sound removal/isolation, vocoding, (extreme) time stretching, pitch shifting, equalization, compression, dynamics processing, noise removal, synthesis of all types of sound, creative processing and countless original effects such as melody flattening, interval stretching, time pixelation, sound rotation, sound blurring, etc.