Today’s fascinating sound is another example of the conversion of digital imagery into sound and was submitted by Manchester based artist Nick Froud. Nick writes:
“I have been following your blog for months and have found it really inspiring. The software featured in your most recent entry is quite similar to a program I (very quickly) put together for an exhibition idea I have. My girlfriend produces photography based and nature and process, I wanted to adopt these ideas into sound that could accompany each of her pictures in a gallery.
The program I made converts an image directly into sound by scanning along each pixel and outputting a sample to a wave file based on an average of the red, green and blue channels. It also outputs the red green and blue channels as CC data in a MIDI file. In this way, I intend to create music entirely generated from an image but with human direction as to choices of effects to be controlled by MIDI data, layering of sounds etc. The sound generated are much noisier than in other sound / image conversion applications, but I think it gives a better feel of the texture of an image.”
You can hear more of Nick’s creations on his myspace sites Crunchy Alligator and Circastate.
Mould
You’ve probably heard enough about my Casiotone 403 by now, but I’m not finished with it yet. What’s my fixation with this outdated, inflexible, cheese filled, imitation wood grain dinosaur? I don’t quite know myself. I can tell you that it’s not the kitsch factor. I actually like the way this relic sounds. So much so that I bothered to open it up to repair a sticky key. What I found inside were well organized electronics in a wooden and metal chassis that opened up like a clam and invited me in. So here’s another example of of sound from the Casiotone. I added a bass line with the Maxi-Korg and delay on the comping. Two great tastes that go great together. 
There are quite a few applications available that produce audio from imagery. Whether it’s photography, or computer generated graphics the results can be fascinating. For further exploration an article that describes eight programs that convert imagery to sound called 
Recently I was invited by Michel Rouzic to try his software, 
Here’s another segment from the live recording I wrote about in the