Making Noise

I'm not really into noise music.  I get it and I've heard some work that I was fairly impressed by, but it's not my cup of tea, if only because it really exacerbates my tinnitus and messes with my otherwise impaired hearing.  So, I was surprised when I found myself really digging the noise that came out of an experiment I did with Audacity's image-to-audio conversion function.

It started with following a link an online friend pointed me to called pixelsynth, in which one can create or import an image and the browser-based synth will convert the brightness values per-pixel into pitches.  Although I thought the app was cool and potentially useful, the synth output clipped badly and I couldn't find how to adjust it and so ended up abandoning it.  But I really liked the concept of image-to-audio, which I had been aware of for some time, and my search for help with pixelsynth led me to an Audacity-based solution.  In the end, I found myself with 16 hours of audio created from one of my favorite images of the Pleiades.  As I said, it felt unexpectedly musical and, after much finagling and negotiations with the sound and with myself, I produced the following piece:



The first few minutes of the piece are unaltered from the original sound file.  Although the sound is never the same -- it maintains this wonderful balance between pattern and variation -- it didn't really have a perceivable sense of direction, an aspect I consider critical to what makes something musical.  To remedy that, I slowly added some basic effects:  panning, delay with feedback, LPF sweeps, and some reverb.  Notably, the reverb-like sound you hear at the beginning is not an added effect, but native to the converted image audio.  There was some light equalizing to balance out the spectrum, but that's it.  I'm pleased with the results -- although not enough to pursue the genre per se!