Tag Archives: Photosounder

Gaussian Blur

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Gaussian blur was the first Photoshop filter I tried applying to sound. I was not sure what to expect. I imagined the signal might be distorted or over-driven in some way. A Gaussian blur is created by applying a Gaussian function, which is also used in statistics for normal distribution. Instead of hearing distortion, the audio, to my ears, actually sounds blurred. The effect is like a chorus, but the envelope is less clear. The attack of each note seems slower or spread out while the frequency is blended or even slightly warbled. All in all a pleasantly surprising experiment.

Gaussian Blurred Electric Piano Pattern

Liquefied

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Once again, here’s the same electric piano from Processing Sound Using Photoshop. This time is has been liquefied by the Photoshop filter of the same name. Liquefy is nice because is relies on the human element of dragging through the image to warp it in the direction the mouse pointer is moved. I purposefully did not liquefy short sections of the waveform so I could compare the original signal and the manipulated one.

Liquified Electric Piano Pattern

 

Spherized

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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

Processing Sound Using Photoshop

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Sound designers, musicians, producers and engineers are all familiar with manipulating sound through the use of audio processing. Most examples of processing, like filters, reverbs, and delays produce a relatively predictable result. I’m interested in processing that has an unpredictable result. For example, the octave pedal that purrs like a robotic kitten when you feed it harmonic input, that I wrote about in Octave Pedal Rhodes. I have a similar interest in producing sound directly from visual media with tools like Michel Rouzic’s Photosounder, which I used for Conversion of Graffiti into Sound.

One of the first things I tried to do with Photosounder was to capture the image it creates from imported audio in order to use an image editing application as an audio processor. This didn’t work very well because much of the resolution was lost with the screen grab. Since then, Michel has added a feature to export full resolution spectral images of sound. This makes the concept of using a Photoshop filter as an audio processor possible.

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.

 

Original Electric Piano Pattern

Glowing Edges Electric Piano Pattern