Recreating the spectrogram face
danielrapp.github.ioVenetian Snares' also had something similar in his "Songs About My Cats" album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlpakpa8zIA
I made something like that, too, but it's not currently online and just a short derpy chip-ish tune anyway.. though the image I embedded was little heart shapes, and they went nicely with the music, so there's that haha.
I used this for it: http://victorx.eu/BitmapPlayer.htm To imagine we can that with moving images in the browser now, well, whoa.
ARSS [1] is a similar tool, check the examples [2]. LTFAT toolbox could do something similar using isgram function [3].
[1] http://arss.sourceforge.net
The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph[1] is a really nifty tool that can convert spectrograms to audio files and vice versa, making tasks like this trivial. Sadly the developer has shifted development into a proprietary project, but the last release of ARSS still works and is a real hoot to play with.
MetaSynth is all about that, you can import visuals, draw over them, filter them and then go back to audio, MetaSynth is available since a very long time, it was first running on Mac OS 9. http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/index.php
This is what RDJ used to make the sounds in the b-side on Windowlicker.
Forgive my ignorance but does a spectrogram carry all the information necessary to reproduce the sound that generated it? For example, assuming I had the spectrogram of a song, could I play the song using it?
The Discrete-Time Fourier Series is invertible. The problem is that for each pixel the Fourier series is a complex number and what is plotted is the magnitude (so the phase is not shown). Reconstructing a signal from only the magnitudes of the Fourier coefficients is ill-posed, i.e. there are multiple signals with the same Fourier coefficient magnitudes.
Still there is active research on reconstructing signals from only the Fourier magnitudes (under several assumptions). This is called the 'phase-retrieval problem'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_retrieval
Yes, the FFT/STFT[1] is generally invertible, potentially subject to knowing the parameters it was generated with, or finding some reference markers in the original input you could use to derive them.
There's also the possibility the spectrographic image itself might be a lossy representation of the actual frequency domain data, in which case you won't get a perfect result back out. Probably recognisable though.
If I had time I'd do some flubbing with octave/scipy and demonstrate it, but alas, the margins of this weekend are too small, etc, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform#I...
This is really innovative!
This made me listen to some Aphex Twin. Ouch. Luckily I soothed my ears with some Black Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUl6iJlEeTE
Aphex Twin has made some softer songs as well, a popular one being this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iiZEto2j2GQ
His newest album Syro also has less aggressive tracks, but it seems to not be on YouTube.
Or if you want a super soft one, how about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWnUuosQwZY
Fascinating! I never would have guessed that the Where We Live intro is an Apex Twin song.
Apologies, I wasn't meaning to say I prefer 'softer' music, only that I can't stand Aphex Twin and love The Black Dog.
Just a personal preference!
Don't be a jerk, please.