![]() It’s also unavailable for images over 30,000 pixels in any direction. This is a memory-intensive transform, and you’ll need a lot of RAM to carry it out on larger images I splurged on an Asus G74S specifically for this purpose. In Photoshop use Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, with the “Polar to Rectangular” radio button selected. If the waveform is coiled into a spiral, as in the case of a gramophone disc, then we need to “de-spiral” it. Adjust the waveform image so that its center or “zero point” coincides with a straight line running from left to right. It’s also generally useful to increase the contrast-often multiple times at the maximum setting in Photoshop-and then to fill the background in with black using the paintbucket tool, always being careful not to lose any detail of the wave shape itself.Ģ. If the trace starts out as a dark trace on a light background, invert it so that it’s a light trace on a dark background. Isolate the trace as a white line on a black background. These are the two methods I used to produce the audio for Pictures of Sound, published in 2012 by Dust-to-Digital.ġ. The distinction between the two methods is that paleospectrophony interprets data as a graph of frequency as a function of time, whereas paleokymophony (or whatever else we choose to call it) interprets data as a graph of amplitude as a function of time. The other is paleospectrophony, which I’ve written about here. It’s one of two basic approaches I’ve been using to educe historical sonic inscriptions as sound-that is, to “play” them, to actualize them for sensory perception from a latent or potential state. One possible name for this practice would be paleokymophony (“old-wave-sounding”). That’s what I’m going to describe how to do. But we can scan the picture of the waveform, convert the digital image data into a digital sound file, and then play the sound file. Of course, it’s not incised sufficiently in depth to guide a stylus on a turntable. If we want to listen to a waveform inscribed two-dimensionally on a piece of paper, the challenge we face is the practical one of transferring that information into a playable form. Barring issues of resolution, there’s no more information in a 78 rpm record or a mono LP than there would be in a picture of the same waveform printed on a piece of paper. But the information is all there in the two-dimensional path of the waveform itself. Because the waveform is incised in depth, it can physically guide a stylus back and forth through its undulations as the disc revolves, which gives us a convenient means of transducing them into an audible sound wave. ![]() After all, if you look closely at the groove of a 78 rpm record or a mono LP, you’ll see that it’s nothing more than an incised waveform coiled into a long spiral. The technique I’ll be describing here “defies belief,” according to Gizmodo.īut really there’s nothing magical or even particularly surprising about the fact that we can turn pictures of audio waveforms into sound. Because of that, the claim that we can play back pictures of sound waves (which seem to be very different things from “records”) is often met with incredulity. For many people, the reproduction of recorded sounds takes place in a conceptual black box: sound goes in, and sound comes out, and it’s stored up in things called “records” in between, but the process itself is all very mysterious.
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