super cool. I love to think of the spectrogram as a blank canvas, where you mix spectral masks to produce interesting synth sounds. This approach takes the "ca

super cool. I love to think of the spectrogram as a blank canvas, where you mix spectral masks to produce interesting synth sounds. This approach takes the "canvas" part more literally producing recognizable objects where we more often see fuzzy or geometric data. like the article mentions, It is highly constrained by the overlap of likeliness of the subject to have a sound that can be reproduced with a spectrogram with features like the object's timbre. It works on the dog very well because a dog's bark is already closer to "noise" than "instrument" or "voice", and you can fit that noise to any octave that is convenient to the image. Notice on the horse how the "neigh" sound wiggles up and down, and thus there are features of the horse that also have wiggling. The castle uses "bell" tones, a great choice because these types of tones prefer non-integer values for harmonics (which comes off as horizontal brick lines in the castle walls). Extra convenient because you can gen new harmonics to get a new wall. The garden views largely use birdsounds. Remember what we said about dog sound being translatable noise, and horse having a wiggle? The bird sound applies both of those techniques, and its sound is represented by the petals or leafs we see. Since we perceive sound at a logarithmic scale, it is possible to show a visual representation of the object and also not being able to perceive it in the final mix! Our ears are most sensitive to the most prominent frequencies, which it looks like here are the darkest pixels. So the lighter pixels can provide some kind of shaping (like edges or boundaries) while the darker pixels provide the sound we perceive. cortland [dot] mahoney [at] gmail [dot] com