Reading JPGs as Sound - An Odd Question
 

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.

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...

Not Beethoven, but....

Darn you beat me to it...

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

Thanks!
 

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.

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

Translating back
 

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.

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.

Vinyl analogue
 

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.

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