Edit0r’s Bloog

Okay, I know it’s been a day since my last post, but I’ve got a few things to tell you all about. Firstly, I’ve been playing around with spectrogram software. Basically, what this does is it takes a Fourrier transform of a sound input (usually the microphone) and displays it as a bunch of frequecies against time. If you want to know more, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

So what exactly have I been doing? Well, I read this excellent page about hidden pictures in music, and decided to have a go myself. I found a nifty little Windows program called Coagula which can generate these sounds from bitmap images, and had a play around with it. I decided to see what would happen if I made a kind of feedback loop by feeding the spectrogram image from a recording of my voice into Coagula. Here are the results:

If you want to try this picture in Coagula yourself, it is 1.54 seconds long, and the frequecy range is from 20Hz to 22050Hz.

My voice before processing
My voice after processing

As you can hear, it’s pretty cool. Other interesting results can be achieved by using the same process on music. As you may know, I have a total J.S. Bach fetish, so naturally I tried this: bach.mid. This MIDI file was nicked from this website, which is also an excellent place to find out more about on this subject: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/javoice.htm. Take a look at their aural rendition of Sierpinski’s Gasket, it’s very interesting! I’ll leave it up to the interested individual to try out this technique on the Bach MIDI!

Secondly, I’d like to say something about someone I miss a lot from St. Andrews. Tom Moffat was the best friend I could have hoped for, and we shared a great many fun times together (see Regs AMV Hell). Since moving to Edinburgh, things just haven’t been the same. I have no one to talk to about old computers, to set off air raid sirens with, or with whom I can dance to Moskau. He’s like a brother to me (but without the constant annoying and beatings), and I really hope he moves to Edinburgh or somewhere close. Maybe if I tell him about Pyrosoc it might persuade him…

Pysrosoc! That’s the other thing I was meaning to say! I’m trying to start up a University society for fellow pyromaniacs, though so far I haven’t really got very far. I’ve got about 11 people signed up, but need 20 for affiliation with the Students’ Association. Hopefully these new posters I designed last night should do the trick:

Poster 1
Poster 2
Poster 3
Poster 4

Good, ja? Now all I have to do is find the money to make a few posters of each.

Ahem, if you need me I’ll be busking on Princes Street…