Saturday, October 5, 2013

Sonification of images

Take a random picture. This is a white ball from an art-deco bridge in Gouda.
It could sound like this:
Turn your volume down or you might blow your speakers and scare the cat.
 
This is the sound you get when you scan the picture vertically and horizontally. The scanning pattern looks like this. I use a boustrophedon scan, otherwise you will get extreme jumps in volume at the edges and the sound wil be too rough. One scan pattern is put in the left channel and one pattern in the right channel.
You can see that the scan pattern produces a mirror-symmetric waveform. This is where both scan patterns cross the wite ball. You can see the big jumps in volume when the scan crosses the white (white = 255) ball.

And this is a more chaotic pattern where the scan just crosses all the random details in the picture, not crossing the ball.
But there are other patterns. You can scan the picture diagonally, starting from the corners. And again one scan pattern is put in the left channel and one pattern in the right channel.
This will sound like this:
 
And there are still more useful patterns. Some nifty recursion creates a nice spiral pattern. One spiral starts at the outside and spirals inward. The other one starts in the middle and spirals outward. And again one scan pattern is put in the left channel and one pattern in the right channel.
This will sound like this:
 
The python source code is here:
 
There are other scanning patterns that I didn't try yet because the programming is very intense:
Now the next step is to use this program for psychogeophysics. We can start listening to the stone tape in the city. To use this for "face playback and primarily inscription: making recordings on surfaces".
 
References:


2 comments: