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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1308 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on August 9, 2003 and belongs in the music category. The previous post was Today, and the next post is Happy Leon Birthday.

Image to Audio

This Metafil­ter post on steganog­ra­phy reminded me of a con­ver­sa­tion I had a couple of years ago with pop­u­lar sonic Tefal-​head Robin Rim­baud (aka Scan­ner). Like the Aphex Twin, Rim­baud was exper­i­ment­ing with making songs using sam­ples that began life as images. If memory serves, he had just fin­ished a track made entirely of pic­tures of Lenny Kravitz. As one does.

Now, I’m pretty sure Rim­baud uses a Mac, and faintly remem­ber him men­tion­ing the name of the appli­ca­tion he used to con­vert .jpgs to .aiffs, but I can find no trace of such a thing. Does anyone know the pro­gram in ques­tion? Or could some­one with better Google skills than mine track it down?

Much obliged.

Update: Memory is a pecu­liar thing. Moments after typing the last para­graph, I remem­bered the name: Meta­synth is the soft­ware in ques­tion, but it is not yet avail­able for OS X.

Posted at 5pm on 09/08/03 by Jack Mottram to the music category.
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10 Comments

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  1. that is weird as

    Posted by Donna at 11pm on 09.08.03

  2. Text in images, less cre­ative but slightly more subversive!

    http://​www.​out​guess.org/
    http://​www.​petit​co​las.​net/​f​a​b​i​e​n​/​s​t​e​g​a​n​o​g​raphy/

    and why not try the GCHQ challenge:

    http://​www.​gchq.​gov.​uk/​c​o​d​e​b​r​e​a​k​i​n​g​/​i​n​d​e​x​.html

    Posted by Donny at 9am on 11.08.03

  3. Hello Don - I think the GCHQ chal­lenge is too hard for me:

    Couldn’t even find a first string of 4 let­ters to get me going.

    Looked at the answers in the end.

    Found it insol­u­ble for poor me, since Safari won’t show the tooltips used to hide some of the clues.

    Cried inside.

    Posted by J-Mo at 6pm on 13.08.03

  4. This con­ver­sa­tion might get some bored ana­lyst in Chel­tenham look­ing at your web­site though. Noth­ing like free publicity!

    Posted by Donny at 10am on 14.08.03

  5. Not with­out a link…

    GCHQ, Chel­tenham

    Ah, there we are.

    I for one wel­come our new code­break­ing over­lords. Etc.

    Posted by Jack at 5pm on 14.08.03

  6. Oh, and Don, how come you always come here via jack​mot​tram.com?

    You and the Google­bot are the only folk who visit that domain!

    Posted by Jack at 5pm on 14.08.03

  7. Just keep­ing your logs inter­est­ing! Listen, Jack I’m in Scot­land this week for the fes­ti­val and a bit of a tour. Are you around Glas­gow the week­end after next or in Edin­burgh at all? Give us a mail.

    Posted by Donny at 9am on 15.08.03

  8. meta­synth is kind of fun for about an hour but tends to just give you mul­ti­ple vari­a­tions of the same sound. the idea of it is much better than the reality.

    Posted by stirmonster at 5pm on 16.08.03

  9. Yeah, I mon­keyed around with it a bit, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a rela­tion­ship between input and output, i.e. very dark grayscale images sound pretty much the same as very bright colour ones. Which makes it… totally point­less. Or, you know, some heavy com­ment on the futil­ity of ren­der­ing images as sound, man.

    Posted by Jack at 2pm on 17.08.03

  10. Thanks

    Posted by Genevieve at 7am on 31.03.04

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