Spectrogram Birthday

Yesterday was my birthday, and my friend awesome Jamie at Rational Acoustics made me this spectrogram:

This is a plot of frequency (X axis) versus time (Y axis) with colors representing intensity (like weather radar).  I stuck the picture into Adobe Audition and got a crazy sound file (don't listen too loud!).  Click here to open an MP3 file.  (It's not really clear what direction Audition is reading the image and I'm too tired tonight to experiment with it, it's still a crazy sound!)

Update on Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 08:57AM by John Huntington

Welcome Boing Boing readers!

Update on Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 06:16PM by John Huntington

Wow, here's the original file from Jamie, it's even cooler than the one I made!

Comments

[Joei]

Hi - any Ideas where to find a 'how-to' for this? Cheers
Joei

[Francisco Vila]

The mp3 is saturated and that ruins the spectrum when viewed in Audacity, at least. Maybe the lossy mp3 compression has a deep visual effect?

[John Huntington]

Joei--one of the Boing Boing commenters posted a link to this cool software: http://photosounder.com/

Francisco, here's a link to the uncompressed wave file:
http://controlgeek.squarespace.com/storage/blog-media/2010/HappyBirthDayControlGeek.wav
And this one is rotated 90 degrees:
http://controlgeek.squarespace.com/storage/blog-media/2010/HappyBirthDayControlGeekRotated90.wav

Maybe you could send me a screen capture of what you got? The original photo I got from Jamie was an mp3 (he just posted it as a lark on Facebook, I never expected to have it on BoingBoing!

Thanks for commenting!

John

[Jamie Anderson]

Hey John,

I've had a bunch of calls today from geeks all over. Zoinks.
I created the wave file with a program called Coagula (Which I grabbed from here: http://hem.passagen.se/rasmuse/Coagula.htm )

Coagula will take a .jpg and turn it into a wav file that will read out on a spectrograph.
Remember, Smaart's spectrograph is vertically oriented (Coagula assumes horizontal), so rotate your image 90 counter-clockwise before making the file (as it is hard to rotate a wav file ;-) )
Play the file into Smaart - you can use Smaart's signal gen to play the file and loop it back in to an input externally.
Then getting the image to read properly is a matter of getting the dynamic range set right for the spectrograph.

Best regards,
-j

[Durin]

I am on the Adobe Audition development team and thought I'd chime in with a little how-to. Audition 3.0 can import image files as audio, and vice versa. To export a file, open it in Audition and switch to Spectral Frequency mode (not necessary, but so pretty.) Choose File > Save As... and select "Spectral Bitmap Image (*.bmp)" as the File type. This file can then be opened in Photoshop or Paint. Audition will write out two BMP files - one for the spectral information (frequency on the vertical axis, time on the horizontal axis) and another for the phase information (i can't tell you how to interpret this as it usually looks like pure noise.) Open the first BMP and edit away and save it as a 24-bit BMP file. If you rename it, you'll want to copy and rename the original Phase BMP as well in order to properly reconstruct the stereo field.

You can also just import any 24-bit bitmap directly into Audition using File > Import Bitmap. You may need to toggle between Linear and Logarithmic mode to display the spectral image properly (available under Window > Spectral Controls)

Fun things to try are applying effects to an audio BMP in Photoshop. Glass Ripple and some of the other effects introduce really ghostly echos and delays when imported back to Audition. If you want to draw something from scratch in Paint and import it, draw in greyscale and keep in mind the brighter the pixel, the more energy (louder) the signal at the frequency range the pixels vertical position represents. You can grab a 30-day trial of Audition for free over at adobe.com.

[Ben John]

That is a really different sound. I wasn't expecting something that cool. Thanks!