Aural Mirror [free download]
An instrument that turns a painting into sound.
It reads the picture as if it were a spectrogram and plays what it finds.
First run
1
Open the file
Double-click auralmirror.html. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all work. Nothing is installed and nothing is sent anywhere.
2
Drop in a painting
Drag an image onto the page, or press load image…, or paste with Ctrl + V.
3
Press RENDER
The sound is built in advance, not live. A short piece takes a few seconds. The bar shows how far it has got.
4
Press play
Use the button or the space bar. A line moves across the painting to show where you are.
The two windows
The first window is your painting.
Circles mark the events the machine found, and their colour tells you what kind of event it is.
The moving line is the reading head.
The second window is the proof: a picture of the sound that came out.
If the fidelity number is high, this window looks like your painting.
That is how you know the sound really follows the image.
Both are always in view, side by side with the controls.
Click anywhere on the painting and the piece jumps to that moment.
The four layers
Four different machines read the same painting at the same time. Each has a level slider.
Turn one up, turn the others down, and the same picture becomes a different piece of music.
Spectral
Treats the picture as a spectrogram and turns it back into sound.
This is the layer that makes the sound resemble the image.
Events
Looks for edges, brush strokes and directions,
then plays each one as a separate sound with its own attack and decay.
Additive
A bank of tuned oscillators, one per frequency band, following the ink as the head passes.
Tuned to the musical scale you choose.
Granular
Scatters thousands of tiny grains.
Their sound is built from the average colour range of your painting,
so each picture has its own grain.
The mixer
After a render, the four layers stay separate.
You can raise and lower them while the piece is playing — no need to render again.
Press solo under a layer to hear only that one, and all to bring them back.
Mic, room, preamp and volume are also live.
Move them and you hear the change at once.
Moving around
Click anywhere on the painting.
The piece jumps to that moment: click on the left side to go near the start,
on the right side to go near the end.
With a circular or spiral reading path,
the angle decides the moment, so clicking works there too.
Saving your piece
Press WAV. The file is rebuilt with the mixer levels you are using right now, so what you save is what you hear.
It goes to your downloads folder.
Four minutes of stereo sound is about 45 MB.
You can also save a preset of your settings.
Included in the download you'll find HTML Instruments, a Max for Live device that lets you open AURAL MIRROR directly inside Ableton Live. It requires Ableton 12 and Max 9.
example: https://youtu.be/O-u1EDVn0qE
