Comments on: Comments on 16682

Post number 16682

delmoi — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 00:58:37 -0800

Hrm. Aphex Twin -- visual artist _{(via memepool)}

By: sixfoot6

sixfoot6 — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 01:45:40 -0800

Oh. My. God. Richard D. James is my fucking hero.

By: mook

mook — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 02:00:18 -0800

Could be that Richard D. James is running a programme to convert images to sound using something like MetaSynth - what you are seeing here is the reverse process, uncovering the images he has used. But on the other hand, ATs music is so distorted, fucked and filtered that images are likely to emerge from the multitude of levels...

By: Mwongozi

Mwongozi — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 04:29:21 -0800

There's a better image here, which makes it fairly clear that this was not accidental.
If you're interested in hearing the sound that produces that spectrograph, you can download a fairly large WAV of it here. Unfortunately you can't MP3 it - the MP3 compression removes the image.
Having said all that, I still hate his music!

By: dabitch

dabitch — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 05:11:41 -0800

I think it looks like a sinister E.T.

By: Su

Su — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 05:18:31 -0800

Yup. I heard about this a long time ago. It's purely intentional. Wish I could remember where I found out about this. It's being a real pain finding anything via Google, but he's been mentioned as Using Metasynth several times. Coagula is also usable for this kind of processing.

By: nedrichards

nedrichards — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 07:21:47 -0800

This is very, very cool. I hadn't hear about this but really like his music. Nice one.

By: bobo123

bobo123 — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 09:44:01 -0800

Unfortunately you can't MP3 it - the MP3 compression removes the image. So I guess this is some really clever scheme Richard D. James came up with so people would have to buy the cd to get the images. Clever.

By: atom128

atom128 — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 09:50:10 -0800

It's worth buying just so you can get the video thats on the cd. Classic stuff.

By: azazello

azazello — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 10:12:14 -0800

me like this much too

By: Espoo2

Espoo2 — Sat, 27 Apr 2002 11:18:02 -0800

happy happy happy i wish my face looked liked that when i wanted it too... That second image is twisted.

By: Down10

Down10 — Sun, 28 Apr 2002 01:13:44 -0800

Come to daddy! I've never heard of "reverse-engeneering" performed on music, but this must be the first. It just goes to show how ingenious Richard's D. James' music really is. I'm going to listen to drukqs again.

By: Satapher

Satapher — Sun, 28 Apr 2002 14:51:25 -0800

i bet it is the likes of MetaSynth or something similar, at first i thought that this was what the entire track sounded like, but that its just a 9 second, while cool, inst mystical or mysterious. i think im gonna listen to drukqs as well. oh, buy a venetian snares album while youre at it.

By: kindall

kindall — Sun, 28 Apr 2002 16:12:28 -0800

It just goes to show how ingenious Richard's D. James' music really is. Yeah, it's real ingenious to use an off-the-shelf software product that is specifically designed to generate sounds from pictures for, well, what it was intended for.

By: ook

ook — Sun, 28 Apr 2002 19:49:19 -0800

This is very different -- and much more impressive -- than just "dinking around with off-the-shelf software". Metasynth uses images as an input, and generates sounds based on those images -- but the correlation between the sound and the image are completely arbitrary, and wouldn't make sense in any other software. (Example: red pixel = stereo pan right, green = pan left). A cute trick, but the sound generated doesn't really have anything intrinsic to do with the image; you could use a different set of rules and end up with a completely different sound from the same image. If you were handed the audio file and didn't know the arbitrary rules that metasynth uses to convert pixels to sound, you'd never be able to retrieve the image. The images Richard James is generating are actually intrinsic to the sound itself, using different densities of various frequencies to create an image: if you look at a spectrogram of the sound waves using *any* software, you'll see the same image. There aren't any arbitrary rules to be followed to see the image; just map frequencies vs time and there it is. Which is pretty fucking ingenious. Sort of like steganography, but much trickier, since this would have to be audible: he would've had to compose the music so that at least the rough approximation of frequencies he'd need would be present in the right places (big blast at all frequencies on each side of the head, little high-frequency blips for the eyes, a persistent band at a lower frequency where the mouth is going to be, etc), then go back and use fourier transforms to fill in the finer detail of the picture. I don't think you're going to manage that with off-the-shelf anything.

By: ook

ook — Sun, 28 Apr 2002 19:53:08 -0800

Just realized I used " marks around what was not a direct quote. Sorry about that.

By: Satapher

Satapher — Sun, 28 Apr 2002 21:29:37 -0800

word, ook.

By: kindall

kindall — Sun, 28 Apr 2002 22:44:07 -0800

MetaSynth is an additive synthesis program and in it, vertical axis = frequency, horizontal axis = time, and luminosity = amplitude. This method of operation means that whatever picture you paste in will show up in the frequency spectrum of the sound, since that is merely the reverse of the process used to create the sound in the first place. The other cool stuff (hue = stereo pan, etc.) will of course not be interpreted by a spectrum analyzer, but the basic shape will come through visibly enough. He just pasted a picture into MetaSynth, rendered the sound, liked what he heard, and used it on his record. Big whoop.

By: ook

ook — Mon, 29 Apr 2002 07:21:51 -0800

Now that I've downloaded and listened to the clip.... You're 100% correct. How disappointing.