It has many great features and settings you can play with, and sounds nice, maybe because it uses an additive synthesis technique instead of the masked filter you often hear in other programs. Not free, and Mac only.Īudio Paint is a free program that does exactly what we want, but does not import sounds, only images (I will explain later why this is important). ARSS from the same programmer has now been abandoned and taken up by somebody else and named Asperes.Īn other French offering is AudioSculpt, a full featured program from the great research institution IRCAM. Also, this program lets you work in layers, which is very useful as you can apply special processing between layers, some particular to image editing, and some to audio processing. Audio files can be imported in "Lossless mode" which means that they will sound a bit closer to the original than if imported otherwise. It is not free, but is relatively affordable. Photosounder has some interesting image and audio editing tools available. Image Line, makers of Fruityloops, include their Harmor plugin with FL studio, or you can buy it separately as an FL plugin. It is likely the best sounding synth plugin of its kind out there. This feature was also dropped from later versions of Audition.Ĭamel Audio Alchemy lets you import png image files, but as far as I know, it won't let you save sounds as images. Adobe Audition 3 (now discontinued, but available for free if you register with Adobe) can both import and export bitmap files, but this function appears to be mono only and a bit buggy. It is however Mac only, and it is not cheap, maybe because is a fully featured synthesis and sound design program. This was the program that Aphex Twin used to create the now famous "Demon" hidden in one of his tracks. One of the first image file to audio file programs I ever saw was Metasynth, and it still seems to be one of the best options out there. Update: He has added Virtual ANS to the collection and it is a very interesting and fun iPad app! PixiVisor by the creator of Sunvox, Alexander Zolotov also does video and animation and is worth checking out, and is multi-platform like so many others of his projects. It lets you take a picture or load one from the camera roll to create a spectrum for use as an oscillator. One app with a unique approach is PPG Wavegenerator for the iPad. An other app that works in a similar way and lets you load your own samples, is Gliss. It sounds convinsingly old school to me, and is very simple to understand. Oramics, which follows this principle, is available as an iPhone app and is not much money for a lot of fun. Early film sound was based on this same principle, where an optical strip on the side of the photo strip was used to create the sound track for the movie. Daphne Oram invented a machine that was able to create sound out of hand written lines, and the ANS synthesizer made use of a glass plate for similar results. The idea has been around for a lot longer than you may think. For now, let's have a look at.īefore you can do any image so sound (and hopefully back) conversion, you need something that can do the job for you. This should also give you an idea about how most programs work in principle, but more on that later. If your software allows you to view the audio as a spectrum, or even as a frequency analysis, you can get a lot of info about that sound very quickly. It seems that there are some universal ways we look at sound, literally, as computer musicians - as a waveform, or blocks of arrangements that are "read" from left to right, just as we read text (well, at least in English). Since we humans are so visually oriented it is convenient for us to link the two together. Creating audio from images is a very intuitive way to compose sounds.
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