Colorstream: Sound into Light

The nice thing about my process for making these color streams (see previous post) is that it lends itself to visually illustrating each step -- with pretty pictures, no less.

We start with a sound file, and create a spectrogram out of it. If you looked at the first page of google results for "spectrogram", you would quickly decide they're only meant to be comprehended by math Ph.D.'s. (This is a shame, because spectrograms are so neat just on their own. There's a lot to them.) But in the end, they're as simple as this: the top of a spectrogram is the high tones (think mosquito in your ear), and the bottom is the low bass tones (think bass singer, singing his lowest note). Here is a spectrogram of me speaking the letters of my name "B-R-I-A-N". (mp3 file here.)



[Glossing over some of the fascinating and peculiar things about spectrograms for the time being*,]
Now, the low (bottom) pitches should map to the lowest frequency of light the eye can see: Red. The high pitches should map to the highest visible frequency of light: Blue/Violet. In between, should be all the colors of the rainbow (or the closest approximation a computer monitor can make).



Next, for each vertical slice (pixel) of the image above, we get the average color from bottom to top. Like mixing paint, this is what the eye would see if these colors were seen together. The progression below illustrates this "averaging" step.




Finally, we have a completed image, a stream of sound on the spectrum of visible light.



* For the mathematicians, the spectrogram above goes from 25 hz sound on the bottom to 10000 hz on top -- on, oddly, a log base 1.4 scale a scale blended between linear and logarithmic scale. More on this, in the future.

Colorstream project

You wouldn't know it from my online activity, but I've been working on a project to visualize sound. Basically, each moment in sound has a certain intensity of low rumbly noises (pitches), medium pitches, high hissy pitches, and all the pitches in between. In "white noise", all these pitches are equally on. It turns out light and color follow a similar pattern. There's a spectrum of color from red to blue (low pitch to high pitch), and a combination of a bunch of colors of the rainbow equates to a color we see with our eyes. All colors on looks white. All colors off, black.

Well, the basis of my project is, "What if we looked directly at the sound spectrum as if it were the light spectrum? What if we could see sound as color?" As it happens, when you look at the 20th Century Fox noise on the color spectrum instead of the sound spectrum, it looks like this (click for larger version):



Pee Wee Herman saying "Large Marge Sent Me" before some spooky music, like this:



The pictures above are the result of a bunch of experimentation to find a useful mapping from sound to color, and learning a few carefully selected programs involved in the process. The steps to do the conversion have been pretty manual, but I've been developing a tool that will automatically generate these "color streams". However, I'll get into that in a future post.