The Sound of Fractals & Photographs

Here’s another Photosounder demo – this time looking at how you can turn fractal images and other photographs from around the world into new sounds.

About Photosounder

Photosounder is a one-of-a-kind image-sound editing program for Windows & Mac. It is unique in that it opens images and sounds indiscriminately, treats and processes them as images, and synthesizes them as sounds.

Sounds, once turned into images, can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn’t be obtained in any other way, while images of all sorts reveal the infinite kinds of otherworldly sounds they contain. Ultimately, knowing how sounds look and how images sound, you’ll be able to create images that sound like what you want to hear, or like what you couldn’t imagine to hear.

Here are some ways Photosounder can be used:

  • Turning a sound upside down (bass sounds become treble and vice versa)
  • Complex soundscapes using extreme time stretching
  • Creating instruments graphically and arranging them into a beat
  • Transmitting photographs through sound
  • Performing operations between different sound files, such as subtracting an instrumental from a song to isolate vocals
  • Isolating or removing an instrument from a complex sound
  • New effects such as piano chorusification or time-pixelation of sound
  • A new take on more classical sound effects such as sound reverb
  • Highly quality and flexibility processing such as denoising
  • Creating new sounds from photographs or fractal images
  • Synthesizing spectrograms created from other spectrographs, such as printed spectrograms of bird calls in books
  • Pitch shifting, pitch interval stretching, sound rotation, time-frequency domain compression
  • Vocoding

via Photosounder

One thought on “The Sound of Fractals & Photographs

  1. Awesome technology. Shows the inherent overlap in how our senses work. I wonder how well this would work in a process like scoring a film — how a composer could take the image, and its resulting sounds to create a score. Not only does this have artistic ramifications, but the ability to translate visuals into sound for blind people, or sound to visuals for deaf people seems quite in reach. Seems like an invaluable tool.

    -Dave
    Productiontrax.com

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