formasfunction

I have a fairly odd question. A band I'm in is putting out a 12" vinyl record, a double LP in fact, but we've found ourselves with an extra side of a LP (we only needed three sides for music) and I was hoping to make creative use of it by filling it with sounds that, when fed back into a computer and run through a simple utility could be translated into images. A good example of what I mean can be found at http://vinylvideo.com/. For the sake of simplicity I was looking into static images rather than video.

Talking to a friend of mine with experience in streaming media, he said it might be possible by taking an image file like a jpg, stripping out the headers on each block and replacing them with the headers of a sound format. The result would be abstract and ugly but just might work.

I'm going to be honest, I have very little knowledge in this realm as I'm mostly a web programmer, but alas I think it would be a great art idea so I'm willing to embarass myself on a forum to at least see if it's plausible.

Thanks in advance for any help or redirection.

LOI Kratong

There was a project posted on this site a few years ago (possibly by DaWei) which did this. There is a handy button in the top right corner labelled search. I may also have it on my computer - if you're lucky i'll dig it out...

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DaWei

Not Beethoven, but....

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LOI Kratong

Darn you beat me to it...

Anyhoo, just make sure you don't have your speakers turned up when you first play it!

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formasfunction

This is exactly what I need, thanks so much. I apologize for not finding it in my earlier searches, I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for.

DaWei

"Beethoven" and "one .exe clapping" aren't exactly search terms you'd consider, right?

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formasfunction

So compiled that code (I'm on a mac but I don't suppose that mattered) and it worked perfectly on a tiff I sent it but now I'm wondering what the best way to translate the sound back into a picture would be. The problem will be that listeners will be pulling these sounds off of a vinyl record and back into their computer so I need a way to interpret the incoming data. How can I pull the relevant data out of the resulting analogue to digital wav file? Am I making any sense? Thanks in advance.

DaWei

You don't have an analog file. You have a digital file tacked onto sound headers. The analog was generated by the player. Just remove the headers and recover the rest of the data; it's right there where you left it.

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formasfunction

Well, the concept was to press the resulting sound onto a vinyl record and then allow people who buy the record to feed the sound into their computer, from their record player, and then use a small utility to convert the newly re-digitized sound (it could be limited to a specific sound type like a wav) back to an image. Thats, in part, what http://vinylvideo.com is doing, though I'm sure their method is quite different.

DaWei

I leave that as an exercise for the reader (don't you just love to say that!)

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Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers