Listening to pictures
Inspired by some talk with friends, mostly by some talk about (god help us) the TV show, Chuck, I got interested (once again) in hidden messages. Not only can messages be hidden in the encoding of image files, images can also be hidden in sound files. There are some quite famous instances of this in the music world.
Basically you create a simple image and insert the image into an audio program as a spectrogram and the software then reads the artificially created spectrogram as a sound file.
For one of my first experiments I converted a line drawing of a rose:
into this fascinating sound.
Here's another example: Listen. Electronic music fans can have a lot of fun with it. Super hypnotising (or super boring, whichever comes last).
But it contains a rendered image of a message in binary. Here's a screen cap:
Made a simple image file, ran it through the conversion program. The message is:
011101000110100001101001011100110010000001101001011100110010000001100001001000000111001101100101011000110111001001100101011101000010000001101101011001010111001101110011011000010110011101100101
I'll decode the binary for you: thisisasecretmessage
Amazing, huh?
Here's a really simple image file:
...that ends up with some really eerie sounds.
ETA: Duh, I forgot to link to the software that I used to do this: 1) AudioPaint converts pictures into sounds, 2) Sonic Visualiser for viewing and analysing the content of sound files. Both progs are free software.
Basically you create a simple image and insert the image into an audio program as a spectrogram and the software then reads the artificially created spectrogram as a sound file.
For one of my first experiments I converted a line drawing of a rose:
into this fascinating sound.
Here's another example: Listen. Electronic music fans can have a lot of fun with it. Super hypnotising (or super boring, whichever comes last).
But it contains a rendered image of a message in binary. Here's a screen cap:
Made a simple image file, ran it through the conversion program. The message is:
011101000110100001101001011100110010000001101001011100110010000001100001001000000111001101100101011000110111001001100101011101000010000001101101011001010111001101110011011000010110011101100101
I'll decode the binary for you: thisisasecretmessage
Amazing, huh?
Here's a really simple image file:
...that ends up with some really eerie sounds.
ETA: Duh, I forgot to link to the software that I used to do this: 1) AudioPaint converts pictures into sounds, 2) Sonic Visualiser for viewing and analysing the content of sound files. Both progs are free software.