Say It With Pictures by Dennis Miller

[Bill Herbert-3]

In line with our recent threads, Dennis Miller
(http://www.dennismiller.neu.edu/) has an article in the September
2008 Electronic Musician magazine titled, "Say It With Pictures,
Eight programs that convert images to music".

He introduces the article with,

"Everybody knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. But did
you know that a picture can also buy you the frequencies of a
thousand oscillators? Using any of several modern music applications,
you can convert the data that forms a picture on the computer screen
into information that will generate an audio file. In most cases, the
program uses the vertical position of each pixel of the image to
control frequency and one or more color (RGB) values for parameters
such as amplitude and stereo position.

In this article, I'll look at a number of programs for both Mac and
Windows that allow you to perform this alchemy. Included are Adobe
Audition 3, Thomas Baudel's HighC 2.2, Camel Audio's Cameleon 5000
1.5, Rasmus Ekman's CoagulaLight 1.66, Nicolas Fournel's AudioPaint
2.1, Image Line FL Studio 8, U&I Software MetaSynth 4, and VirSyn
Poseidon 1.4. I'll also cover Mark Coniglio's Isadora 1.2.9, which
can convert images to sound but is better suited to work in the
opposite direction (see the sidebar "Izzy Gets Down"). I'll start
with a general overview of the field before looking at each program
individually.

Note that AudioPaint, Coagula, and HighC are standalone applications
whose only role in life is the conversion of images to sound and,
perhaps, vice versa. For Audition, Cameleon, FL Studio, MetaSynth,
and Poseidon, image-to-sound conversion is just one of many features.
Also, many of the ideas that drive image-to-sound software stem from
research by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer whose UPIC system was
among the first to allow musicians to draw the data used to generate
sounds (see the online bonus material "The UPIC System" at
emusician.com). Xenakis used imagery in creative ways when composing
both his acoustic and electronic works."

Bill H