Tag Archives: Processing

Unreleased Extended Version of Some Kind of Adhesive

Posted on by
Reply

Another collaborative effort that I am quite pleased with is this extended version of Some Kind of Adhesive produced and performed by myself and Nils Westdal. The piece is eleven minutes and seventeen seconds long and contains four interwoven movements. The original condensed version is heard on One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). Once again, processing played an integral role in the production and performance of the work.

This is an ACB exclusive preview since the track has not been released on Unearthed Music, or any other label. It will probably be released this year on a compilation or as a single. In the meantime, please enjoy listening to this full length preview at 192kbps.

Some Kind of Adhesive
[Extended Mix]

Segment of New track at 84 bpm

Posted on by
4

Here’s a brief segment of a new track I’m working on. I don’t have much to say about it other than it’s at eighty four beats per minute and involves lots of processing. It is still untitled and far from complete, but I expect that it will be included on the album that I have committed to releasing this March on Unearthed Music. If you listen carefully you may recognize one of the layers as the sound from Octave Pedal Rhodes.

84 Octave (working title)

More Image to Sound Techniques: Mould by Nick Froud

Posted on by
1

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

Manipulating Sound Through Imagery

Posted on by
2

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 Say it With Pictures is available on emusician.com. An additional application that I’ve been looking at recently called Photosounder has the unique capability of allowing you to manipulate sound in its image state. This creates a whole host of effects from time stretching to flipping the sound upside down creating a bizarre, inverse, reflection of the original sound. For this example I used Photosounder to process the sound from More Memory Man Madness. A few of the adjustments I made were the rotation of the image, the gamma property, and pixels per second.

Memory Man Through Photosounder

Conversion of Graffiti into Sound

Posted on by
10

Recently I was invited by Michel Rouzic to try his software, Photosounder, designed for converting images into sound. Image to sound conversion is something I’ve been meaning to explore, so today I finally had some time to have a look. The software does much more than create strange sound from images. It’s a great time stretching tool, and it also reads in wave files as images allowing you to use the same sort of manipulation you can do on image based files.

This sound was created from the full resolution version of the graffiti photo shown. I settled on this image because of it’s simplicity, and the diagonal strokes of the tag produced a nice cascade of descending pitches. The way the flash lights up the center of the photo gave the sound a dynamic swell that I emphasized by adjusting the gamma parameter. Photosounder allows you to set the time and frequency range of the audio produced, so for this example I put the bottom at 52Hz and the top at 12kHz.

Graffiti Photo to Sound