audiopaint

not entirely sure what this technology section was intended to contain, but i thought i'd contribute something so it's not such a ghost town around here.

i stumbled, a few weeks ago, across a program called audiopaint (available at nicolasfournel[dot]com/audiopaint.htm since i still can't provide an actual link). what this does is take an image (jpeg/gif/png/bmp format) and analyze it using user-definable criteria to produce an audio file (wav format); the default track length is just a couple seconds, but you can adjust that to any length you'd like. essentially, it's a synthesizer whose parameters are determined by an image's pixels.

i've been poking around at the idea of using this to create meditative tracks from images that represent the will of my intent, so to speak. i'd think that you could even take that a step further and use this in some sort of sigil magick by creating a sigil/rune/whatever in your graphic program of choice and running that through audiopaint to get an audio track to meditate on. just a thought.

I'm not sure who but someone told me to make this section and then never posted anything in it. But this is actually very cool. Do the sounds that come out just sound like white noise? Is it like a harsh sound or can it be smooth and relaxing enough to use to meditate? I've heard of spectrographs before and the sounds they typically produce are rather unpleasant and abbrassive.

the sound you get is going to depend largely on the image you use. the best results will be with lots of subtle color gradients and gentle slopes. my favorites so far were with darker images that only had a few different hues of the same color sweeping across the image; those produced sort of a drone. the best thing i can recommend is to just play around with it; the sound won't be for everybody, obviously, but the more abstract and uniform images will give the gentlest results. though, even then, you can change (to an extent) what parameters audiopaint uses to determine the frequency and amplitude of its audio output. it'll always be electronic sound, though, so if that's not your thing then you may not enjoy it. but it's free, and not a huge file, so it's not a lot of effort wasted if you don't enjoy it.

edit:
oh, couple other things.
a) i would highly recommend reading through the site, the guy that designed this describes a little about how it works.
b) mentioned on the site, but i thought i'd reinforce it: hubble images are really cool to listen to.
c) i suppose that if the raw output is too harsh for you, you could do some audio processing on it to soften things up a bit. some reverb, maybe delay, and a little chorus or low-pass filter would give it a bit more of a dreamy underwater sound.