Image to Audio

The image to audio reverse spectrogram is a program that takes any image uploaded by the user and reads the pixels like notes on a piece of sheet music. I chose this project as something of a reference to how I first became involved in design; working alongside musicians to turn their musical ideas into visually appealing designs. This project allowed me to do the reverse of this process for once! The program allows for total freedom of image choice, audio complexity, and speed of playback. This is done by dividing the uploaded image into a large grid of individual cells, these cells are read from left to right, producing tones based off the hue, saturation, and brightness of their color values. This process makes for endlessly interesting, unique, and surprisingly enjoyable audio generated from nothing more than an image on the users computer. The main challenge I faced in the creation of this project was finding a way to create meaningful depth within the tones produced by an image, oftentimes I found myself faced with bland or audibly offensive results. I combatted this issue by expanding the scope of what the program is reading to produce these tones, breaking up large chunks of colors by increasing the density of cells within the grid, as well as by adjusting the sound profiles of the notes themselves.