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
Finding a new way to use my 
One of my favorite external processors is my 
A variation of this clip is probably going to end up in a new track that Nils Westdal and I are working on. After a recent session Nils left his Boss OC-1 pedal in the studio for me to mess around with. The first thing I did was plug the Rhodes into it. The cool thing about the OC-1 is that if you play intervals into it it gets confused and randomly switches between notes. The results are unpredictable, but it’s also possible to get consistently unpredictable results. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but duplicating certain intervals at specific dynamics allows you to mold the output into something usable. This is what I was going for in this example. I edited the recording to a suitable length, added some delay, and then automated a filter to manipulate the texture.
I time stretched this recording of my dog Tia barking on the PCM-D50 using the built in DPC or Digital Pitch Control. I don’t know why they call it pitch control when it doesn’t change the pitch, but rather time compresses or expands the audio by percentages, from -75% to +100%. The intent is for musicians to practice difficult passages, but I think it has a nice eerie, metallic effect on voice and other sounds. For comparison I’ve posted her barking with out the time expansion as well.