In the past, I’ve relied on Andrew Jaremko’s ImageToSound, a piece of freeware designed to convert any 24-bit BMP into an 8-bit WAV file as though it were an image of an optical film sound track. Wouldn’t writing some software to do this be far easier and produce greater fidelity? It seems you used an extraordinary lengthy and convoluted process to generate barely audible sound. That method works, but a point raised by one reader is well taken: I’ve previously described a circuitous method of doing that here and here, as well as in my book Pictures of Sound. The question is how to convert that image into a playable audio file so we can listen to it. Or maybe it’s just a random squiggly line you want to treat as an audio waveform to find out what happens. Or maybe it’s an ink print on paper made from a gramophone disc a few decades later (converted, in this case, from a spiral into parallel lines by a polar-to-rectangular-coordinates transform). Maybe it’s a phonautogram from the 1850s or 1860s: a record of sound traced in soot on a moving paper sheet for visual analysis at a time when playback wasn’t yet on the table. Let’s say you have a digitized image of an audio waveform-a graph of the amplitude of sound vibrations as a function of time. It doesn’t have the friendliest of interfaces, but it’s relatively easy to get up and running, and it’s free (as in free beer, not free puppy), so the price is right. After years of trying to get existing software to do things it was never intended to do, I’ve finally written some code of my own for converting pictures of sound waves into playable audio.
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