The Spherize filter in Photoshop is designed to force an image to bubble outward as if wrapping it around a sphere. Can you imagine what it would sound like to warp audio in the same fashion? I imagined that that the frequency would warp downward as the waveform was stretched and then back up to the original pitch on the opposite side.
Well, that’s almost exactly what happened, although I didn’t expect it to sound as deep and eerie as it does. For this entry I have shortened the image horizontally to emphasize what the filter actually did. I also lightened the image to make it more visible. It looks a bit like a zeppelin whereas the original image of the sound was flat. Please enjoy the Spherized version of the loop from the last entry.
Spherize Electric Piano Pattern
To test this concept I created a simple pattern with an electric piano patch and opened it in Photosounder. Without changing any settings I immediately saved the sound as a bitmap image. Next I opened the image in Photoshop and started experimenting with filters. Once I had some filtered images I loaded them back into Photosounder to see how they sounded. Gaussian blur and Liquefy created some unique effects, but my favorite of the bunch was Glowing Edges. This filter seems to transform the electric piano into a haunting choral passage.
While working in the studio recently I plugged in a cable from an auxiliary send to record some bass and got some horrible feedback. So horrible that I was determined to record it. The reason I was getting the feedback was because the same send that I was using to record the bass happened to be turned up on the channel that I was using to monitor the signal. I realized this immediately, but the sound was quite interesting due to the subtle latency on the signal path caused by the digital hardware involved. Here’s a couple of layers of the feedback running through reverb. I also made adjustments to the pitch a time stretched the recording in a few places.