Sound Portrait by heather galaxy
July 29th, 2010 9:02 PMZach lovingly supplied equipment and ideas and let me know what to do with this or that do-hickey on his computer.
So first we took a picture! Then we looked at the histogram for this picture!
At this point I decided it'd be cool to match the sound to the histogram. So we created both a wave form that looked like the histogram and then I painstakingly drew lines on a print out of the histogram to corresponding notes and then entered them into the music program while Zach was making dinner for me and his wife (it was a delicious peanut stir-fry btw).
Trying to figure out what I would sound like, I figured I'd probably sound quite like how Pandora described my musical taste "minor key tonality" with "extensive vamping." I guess I think of myself as a little bit gothy, a little bit classical, and a heavy dose of weirdo. So let's see if this accomplishes this at all in that way!
25 vote(s)

Amby D
5
Pixie
5
Julian Muffinbot
3
Samantha
3
Markov Walker
4
Spidere
5
rehsamsevoL Lovesmasher
4
Sombrero Guy
5
Dela Dejavoo
5
Togashi Ni
5
LittleMonk
5
MsGoblinPants Extraordinaire
5
carry_me_Zaddy
5
Indy
5
Lincøln
5
teh Lolbrarian
5
Happy McDeath
5
anna one
4
Zenobia
3
Bear Farmer
3
Loki
4
Sir Pinkleton
4
Kevlar Moonraven
5
PsyDlocke
5
Ela Tesla
Terms
foecake8 comment(s)
So basically Zach took the photo of me on my phone, I mailed it to him, we put it in Photoshop. We color corrected it a bit and then got the histogram you see there! We then screencaptured, cropped, and printed it out.
But anyway, it's just the density of color (RGB as is shows there)... I'm not sure how exactly it's plotted, but it's probably something like what you suggested (my computer image program knowledge is very small... someone with more knowledge jump in), but that's what we got after the color correcting. It was totally smooth before we corrected it, but the manipulation created the nice modulations. At first we were thinking how color and sound waves could look exactly the same, but all of a sudden I saw it as notes and this is what happened!
I basically then just picked a random place to plot C4 and then went at all the coding.
Until this went up, I wasn't sure I'd ever see a completion of this I really liked. :)
Also: Heather Galaxy! It's exciting to see you on SF0 again!
You compliment me so!!! :)
Thanks! It's exciting for me to be back! :)
I think it does sound like you! Or at least, it sounds like an aspect of you.
I was thinking of doing something like this.
It sounds a lot better than I'd assumed it would!
This is a neat idea. How did you get a histogram from the image? IE, what is being binned in that histogram? Is it number of pixels with colors in a range of wavelengths?
This suggests another neat idea. Render an image of yourself in black and white, and then create a sound whose spetrogram reproduces that image. I'd really like to see someone try this.