Here is another recently produced example of processing sound with Photoshop via Photosounder. In this instance I applied the Halftone Pattern filter under the Distort sub menu.
With this particular effect I find the sound of the noise in between the phrases of dialogue more interesting than the dialogue itself. It has an odd digital scrambling sort of quality that I can imagine using in a audio project for one reason or another.
1972 Dialogue with Distort Halftone Pattern
Testing the newest version of Photosounder gave me an opportunity to apply some Photoshop filters to sound that I had not yet tried. I experimented with halftone patterns, lens blur, pixelated color halftones, the patchwork filter, and the smudge tool.
One of the more interesting filters ended up being the plaster effect under distort. The plaster effect has a relief setting to give the image a 3D look, but also smooths the insides of areas within the image. This eliminated the noise between the speech, but also made the dialogue virtually unintelligible.
1972 Dialogue Through Distort Plaster
Michel Rouzic has just released version 1.4 of Photosounder that includes a new “lossless” mode so the output is identical to the input. Previously there was some loss of resolution importing the audio. From Michel:
Basically the lossless mode in question is a sort of 2D time-frequency filtering mode, kind of like some other programs like Audition 3 do by letting you airbrush on a spectrogram, that’s the idea basically. The difference here is that besides the brushes that Photosounder has, you can export the image to Photoshop and do some very precise filtering, for example making a sound feature disappear by hand, enhancing parts of a sound, subtracting to sound as I once did by making the difference between a song’s spectrogram and its instrumental version’s spectrogram to isolate the vocals, experiment with contrast, curves, levels, sharpening, various effects (I’m pretty sure you could for example try the glowing edges again and get a different sounding result).
To illustrate the lossless mode, here’s a segment of dialogue from a 1972 social commentary film in the public domain presented with the lossless mode on and again with it off. The lossless mode sounds exactly like the original waveform, while without the lossless mode the audio lacks resolution.
Photosounder Dialogue with Lossless Mode On
Photosounder Dialogue with Lossless Mode Off
No, this is not the answer to a “before and after” puzzle in an episode of Wheel of Fortune. They are two of many Photoshop filters. These sound files are the rejects. Although not bad, I did not find the effect these filters had on my electric piano passage as interesting as the rest of my experiments. They also sound very similar to each other, which might not be the case using different sounds, or with other settings. Anyway, this is it for my first round of using Photoshop filters to process audio. Next time I plan on trying this with some more natural, acoustic sounds.
Crystalized Electric Piano
Ocean Ripple Electric Piano
So far my examples of Processing Sound Using Photoshop have been recognizable in comparison to the original versions. In my initial experiments my intent was to apply subtle changes as a reference. However, it’s interesting to hear what happens without restraint. Here I applied the Wave filter, which in many respects is analogous to sound. For example, you can assign a sine, square, or triangle wave to process the image. This filter changes the sound so dramatically that you might very well get similar results from altogether different sound sources. Imagine an ensemble of people wobbling sheets of flexible material in sync with each other.
Wave Electric Piano Pattern