Recreating the spectrogram face

http://danielrapp.github.io/spectroface/

by DanielRapp • 12 years ago

79 16 12 years ago

danielrapp.github.io

rikkus2• 12 years ago

This made me listen to some Aphex Twin. Ouch. Luckily I soothed my ears with some Black Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUl6iJlEeTE

y2bd• 12 years ago

Aphex Twin has made some softer songs as well, a popular one being this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iiZEto2j2GQ

His newest album Syro also has less aggressive tracks, but it seems to not be on YouTube.

rikkus2• 12 years ago

Apologies, I wasn't meaning to say I prefer 'softer' music, only that I can't stand Aphex Twin and love The Black Dog.

Just a personal preference!

lifeformed• 12 years ago

Or if you want a super soft one, how about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWnUuosQwZY

staticshock• 12 years ago

Fascinating! I never would have guessed that the Where We Live intro is an Apex Twin song.

sneak2• 12 years ago

Don't be a jerk, please.

sprokolopolis• 12 years ago

Venetian Snares' also had something similar in his "Songs About My Cats" album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlpakpa8zIA

PavlovsCat• 12 years ago

I made something like that, too, but it's not currently online and just a short derpy chip-ish tune anyway.. though the image I embedded was little heart shapes, and they went nicely with the music, so there's that haha.

I used this for it: http://victorx.eu/BitmapPlayer.htm To imagine we can that with moving images in the browser now, well, whoa.

mrkrd• 12 years ago

ARSS [1] is a similar tool, check the examples [2]. LTFAT toolbox could do something similar using isgram function [3].

[1] http://arss.sourceforge.net

[2] http://arss.sourceforge.net/examples.shtml

[3] http://ltfat.sourceforge.net/doc/demos/demo_isgram.php

wetmore• 12 years ago

This is really innovative!

dTal• 12 years ago

The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph[1] is a really nifty tool that can convert spectrograms to audio files and vice versa, making tasks like this trivial. Sadly the developer has shifted development into a proprietary project, but the last release of ARSS still works and is a real hoot to play with.

[1]http://arss.sourceforge.net/

FraKtus• 12 years ago

MetaSynth is all about that, you can import visuals, draw over them, filter them and then go back to audio, MetaSynth is available since a very long time, it was first running on Mac OS 9. http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/index.php

sneak2• 12 years ago

This is what RDJ used to make the sounds in the b-side on Windowlicker.

sysk• 12 years ago

Forgive my ignorance but does a spectrogram carry all the information necessary to reproduce the sound that generated it? For example, assuming I had the spectrogram of a song, could I play the song using it?

shabble• 12 years ago

Yes, the FFT/STFT[1] is generally invertible, potentially subject to knowing the parameters it was generated with, or finding some reference markers in the original input you could use to derive them.

There's also the possibility the spectrographic image itself might be a lossy representation of the actual frequency domain data, in which case you won't get a perfect result back out. Probably recognisable though.

If I had time I'd do some flubbing with octave/scipy and demonstrate it, but alas, the margins of this weekend are too small, etc, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform#I...

AidanChurch• 12 years ago

The Discrete-Time Fourier Series is invertible. The problem is that for each pixel the Fourier series is a complex number and what is plotted is the magnitude (so the phase is not shown). Reconstructing a signal from only the magnitudes of the Fourier coefficients is ill-posed, i.e. there are multiple signals with the same Fourier coefficient magnitudes.

Still there is active research on reconstructing signals from only the Fourier magnitudes (under several assumptions). This is called the 'phase-retrieval problem'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_retrieval

Recreating the spectrogram face

Related Stories