Early experiments: encoding images with sound

The predecessor to our MATLAB synthesizer is a function we call RevSpectrogram, which interprets an image of any size as a spectrogram of a sound, and creates the sound based on the intensity of the pixels in the image. When the sound is visualized, the spectrogram image obtained retains much of the properties of the original image.

We encoded four sample pictures with RevSpectrogram:
1. An improvised picture with white lines
2. Picture of a gull (taken by Andy Wang)
3. "Earthrise", taken by William Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission to the moon
4. A Windows glass desktop background

The reverse spectrogram interpolates each pixel to a linearly-spaced frequency index. The frequent clicks you hear prevalently are a result of the linearly-spaced sine waves matching up every 1/20th of a second.