AudioPaint

About AudioPaint

generates sounds from pictures. The program reads JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP files and translates each pixel color and position into frequency, amplitude and pan information. AudioPaint can therefore be considered as a massive additive synthesizer.

A picture is actually processed as a big frequency / time grid. Each line of the picture is an oscillator, and the taller the picture is, the higher the frequency resolution is. While the vertical position of a pixel determines its frequency, its horizontal position corresponds to its time offset.

By default, the color of a pixel is used to determine its pan, the red and green components controlling the amplitude of the left and right channels respectively (the brighter the color, the louder the sound), and the blue component is not used. The action of each component can be modified in the Routing section of the Audio Settings window. Starting with version 2.0, AudioPaint can also convert the color components into HSB values, and use hue, saturation and brightness instead of red, green and blue.

Depending of the picture, several hundreds (or even thousands) of oscillators can be generated simultaneously. Due to the large amount of data to process, AudioPaint is not real-time. Once you chose your picture and the parameters, you generate a sound. Then you can save it as a .WAV file for further processing in a sound editor such as Sound Forge / Wavelab etc…. or to import it as an audio track in a sequencer (Sonar, Acid etc…).

Of course the sounds generated will vary depending on the type of picture used.

Download: AudioPaint 2.1