Images in sound.
Swayze
14,705 Posts
Taken from: http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.phpThe Aphex Face[/b]Some time ago, in the summer of 2001 if I recall correctly, I ran into an intriguing page at http://chaos.yerbox.org/face/. The page, which sadly has since then disappered from the face of the earth, was all about this hidden "demon face" in one of Aphex Twin's tracks, #2 (the long formula) on "Windowlicker".This face was supposed to be viewable with a spectrograph program, so I decided to try it myself. A spectrograph basically visualizes the sound spectrum.First I needed to extract the track from the Windowlicker CD, which was easy with CDex. The extraction of the whole track was not really necessary because the "face" is situated at the very end of the track, starting from the 5:27 mark and lasting for about 10 seconds. There are other "audio images" on this particular track as well (and one at the end of the first track), but the face is certainly the most exciting of them all.After I had the wav-file, I used a program called Spectrogram to visualize the file. To my amazement, it worked, and I was soon staring at the "demon" face: 
I was, however, not content with this. Why would the good ol' Twin have added a "demon" face into one of his tracks? I mean, the man does have a weird sense of humor, but I always thought demons were more up BoC's alley...While examining the image, I came to the conclusion that something was not right. So I started messing around with the settings of the spectrograph program, and after a bit of knob twiddling the mystery revealed itself: the face was supposed to be watched with a logarithmic frequency scale, not with a linear scale.A linear scale provided the "demon face", but with a logarithmic scale the end results were quite different:
Why, it was none other than the Twin himself all the time, complete with his patented grin!The settings which I used to get the above image were roughly the same as in the picture below (they aren't the exact same settings since I've lost them somewhere, but if you try them yourself you'll find that they are more than close enough):
spectogram settings for reproducing the face___________A few more pictures and links can be found at the website.
I was, however, not content with this. Why would the good ol' Twin have added a "demon" face into one of his tracks? I mean, the man does have a weird sense of humor, but I always thought demons were more up BoC's alley...While examining the image, I came to the conclusion that something was not right. So I started messing around with the settings of the spectrograph program, and after a bit of knob twiddling the mystery revealed itself: the face was supposed to be watched with a logarithmic frequency scale, not with a linear scale.A linear scale provided the "demon face", but with a logarithmic scale the end results were quite different: Why, it was none other than the Twin himself all the time, complete with his patented grin!The settings which I used to get the above image were roughly the same as in the picture below (they aren't the exact same settings since I've lost them somewhere, but if you try them yourself you'll find that they are more than close enough):spectogram settings for reproducing the face___________A few more pictures and links can be found at the website.
Comments
Coagula - Industrial Strength Color Organ
That is dope!
Oh yeah, Metasynth, of course. Didn't even think of that. I used to fuck around with that a couple of years ago. Fun program. Maybe it's time to put on my best screwface and start using it again for some blazing bleeps.