Re: [microsound] image to sound conversion software

[Anthony Saunders <anthony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

there are a lot of apps that will open any file for you, but that's 
generally not very satisfying beyond the immediate visceral thrill of 
the harsh sound of raw data. Good for source material.

Apps like Metasynth and Hyperupic are much more interesting in the long 
term, because they are specifically designed for this application.

Metasynth 4 is desirable and powerful, but priced outside the range of 
an impulse buy, ($599 for the 24bit version!), so this encouraged me to 
spend some time with Hyperupic and Photoshop Elements (as Hyperupic 
leaves you to use an image editor of your own choice), which I found to 
be quite rewarding.

the basic principle is that the image is read in with one dimension 
being time and the other being the frequency spectrum. the colors are 
then translated into sound based on their intensities, and you can also 
have it interpret the stereo space. An enormous amount of flexibility 
is supplied in the way you can create scales and frequency 
distributions... you can lose hours, in the best way, to tweaking the 
settings!

it can use either a sinewave or an additive series of sinewaves or an 
audio file as the oscilator for the sounds.

I get the most useful/expressive results by making images that are very 
light with colors that fade in and out, with much more intense pieces 
here and there to encourage a wide dynamic range. taking the time to 
run the process on the same image with multiple audio files as the 
sound source, and tweaking the wide variety of settings and saving 
dozens of audio files is the strategy I take with this.

hyperupic is freeware for OS X (and originally Next): 
http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~penrose/soft/index.html

one of the projects I'm currently working on uses roughly 60 sounds 
made with hyperupic and photoshop, and then layered and processed with 
Logic Pro 7 and Soundhack.

Anthony


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