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But can you turn the music you just made back into the image it came from?
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Making music from images, and the other way around


Feb. 26, 2006


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard

   Most software is just plain dull. This week I have two antidotes -- a program that makes music out of pictures and another that makes pictures out of music.
   The picture-to-music software is one of the weirdest things I've ever played with. It's called SoundOfAnImage -- yes, the name's all squished together, JustLikeThis -- and it's so fascinating I can guarantee you'll disappear from normal family life for hours the first time you try it.
   But listen up before you download this freebie. It's an OS X program. If, like an increasing number of virus-free Apple users nationwide, you have an OS X Macintosh in your family computing tree, you should grab this program right away. But there's no Windows version -- not yet, anyway. I'll keep you posted if one comes along.
   Mac OS X users should go get SoundOfAnImage from www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/17402.
   All you do is drag a picture onto the image well in the program (or use the old-fashioned way and click the "Load Image" button), then choose your instruments from three sound groups. Then pick a tempo and decide whether you want your music to be based on the image's pixels or its "lines" of image data. (I could never decide, so I usually tried both.)
   Click "Play" to listen to a musical translation of your photo or "Save MIDI" to save a playable audio file of the music. You don't have to use an actual photograph, of course; I got great results (psychologically as well as musically) choosing a scan I made of an Easter card my grandniece gave me last year.
   If you're into the sounds of deep space, you should hear the music I made from of a Hubble space telescope photo of a distant galaxy. In fact, you CAN hear it; here's my Easter card tune, here's music gleaned from a MacWorld magazine cover from the 1980s showing Steve Jobs, and here is a MIDI composition created from a deep space photo of a galaxy. They were all made with SoundOfAnImage.
   Windows users can have fun with a free program that does the opposite thing. The software is MIDIART Live, from www.midiworks.com/martlive.htm. MIDIART Live turns MIDI music into computer-generated images.
   Being a funky kind of guy, the first thing I did when I installed MIDIART Live onto my Windows notebook computer was -- you guessed it! -- to try to turn the melodies I got from SoundOfAnImage back into the pictures they came from.
   Drum roll! Spooky organ music! Can software turn hamburger back into steak?
   I won't keep you waiting for an answer. No dice. No picture of the Easter card, either. No Hubble space photo. Just some fascinating but non-photogenic computer graphics. But they're fun to look at, and every picture makes a different graphic. Just remember: In photo-to-music translation just as in great American novels, you can't go home again.
   Want more? Windows music lovers who like to view or generate fractal images might try another freebie, Fractmus, from www.softlookup.com/display.asp?ID=19401&DID=4J58YURT. (Excuse that complicated URL, please; that's the only reliable location I could find for the file.)
   Fractmus lets you turn mathematical formulas into music and then turn that music into approximations of fractals. Fractals, which contain patterns that repeat infinitely, can be quite beautiful. For a look at one of my favorite fractal images, download this picture: www.technofileonline.com/images/tiera.jpg.