Software Allows You to Hear Your Photos

Powerful new spectral software economically converts your photos to mesmerizing sound [Amazing video after jump]
Software turns images and photos into sound

Photosounder is a new image and sound analysis program that is absolutely amazing in its operation, and might one day change the way we interpret our visual and audio senses. It is unique in that it synthesizes both images and sounds. Sounds, once turned into images, can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn't be obtained in any other way.

Ultimately, knowing how sounds look and how images sound, you'll be able to create images that sound like what you want to hear, or like what you couldn't imagine to hear.

Photosounder is a cutting edge spectral editing program, offering the best spectrogram editing and synthesis capabilities, making use of unique spectrograph, synthesis and filtering algorithms developed specifically to achieve the best results possible. Photosounder turns sound processing problems into image processing challenges, and brings the power and flexibility of familiar image processing tools to the creation and transformation of sounds. This groundbreaking approach is what allows us to push the boundary of what we thought was possible.

Instrument Isolation

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In the video above, you can see how to extract a continuous synth line graphically using Photosounder. The synthesiser is harmonic, which means it is composed of vertically stacked parallel lines, separated by constant vertical distances. It is crucial to be able to identify the position of the base frequency, which is the lowest of those lines. It might not always be easily seen, and sometimes it's entirely absent.

Here are some ways Photosounder can be used:

* Creating new sounds from photographs or fractal images
* Turning a sound upside down (bass sounds become treble and vice versa)
* Complex soundscapes using extreme time stretching
* Creating instruments graphically and arranging them into a beat
* Transmitting photographs through sound
* Performing operations between different sound files, such as subtracting an instrumental from a song to isolate vocals
* Isolating or removing an instrument from a complex sound
* New effects such as piano chorusification or time-pixelation of sound
* A new take on more classical sound effects such as sound reverb
* Highly quality and flexibility processing such as denoising
* Synthesizing spectrograms created from other spectrographs, such as printed spectrograms of bird calls in books
* Pitch shifting, pitch interval stretching, sound rotation, time-frequency domain compression
* Vocoding

To help you find that base frequency, you can, using any brush tool and the harmonics modifier (the button with four vertically stacked dots), hover over the image to see an overlay of the first few harmonics and with your mouse cursor try to match the cross hair overlay with the lines on the screen. This is fairly straightforward, however things can sometimes be a bit confusing. It is best to try what seems like the lowest possibility first in order to avoid confusing the first harmonic (the second line from the bottom) with the base frequency (the first line), but in the case of a chord, it is best to try to erase the higher notes first.

Photosounder is available for Windows (2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista), Mac OS X 10.4+ Universal (Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, on both PowerPC and Intel machines). It can also run on Linux using the latest development release of Wine.

The price is certainly reasonable at $36, and a free demo is available.

Photosounder