Processing Sound Using Photoshop

Audio Cookbook’s John Keston is doing some interesting experiments with processing sound using Photoshop:

Sound designers, musicians, producers and engineers are all familiar with manipulating sound through the use of audio processing. Most examples of processing, like filters, reverbs, and delays produce a relatively predictable result. I’m interested in processing that has an unpredictable result.

I created a simple pattern with an electric piano patch and opened it in Photosounder. Without changing any settings I immediately saved the sound as a bitmap image.

Next, I opened the image in Photoshop and started experimenting with filters. Once I had some filtered images I loaded them back into Photosounder to see how they sounded. Gaussian blur and Liquefy created some unique effects, but my favorite of the bunch was Glowing Edges. This filter seems to transform the electric piano into a haunting choral passage.

Check out the full post, with audio examples, at the AudioCookbook site.

2 thoughts on “Processing Sound Using Photoshop

  1. It sounds like there’s a bridged opportunity here to have more soft synth plugins (instead of standalone programs which aren’t integrated) which have built-in image editors for this type of eclectic synthesis. Are there any?

  2. I am looking for a similar way of processing and producing sound the same way one process and produces images in Photoshop (i.e. creating sound as one creates images out of an empty canvas in Photoshop)…..
    or maybe a software that can convert images into sound ……
    PS: i am a Mac user :s

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