strange musical instrumens

Photosounder is a one-of-a-kind image-sound editing program that can open images and sounds indiscriminately, treat and processes them as images, and synthesize them as sounds.

Sounds, once turned into images, can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn’t be obtained in any other way, while images of all sorts reveal the infinite kinds of otherworldly sounds they contain. 

Here’s what’s going on in the demo video above:

We first load a sound into Photosounder, which is converted into an image. We first listen to that image by turning it back into a sound, then, by pressing buttons 180° and FLIP, we flip it vertically, as to make the image appear upside-down, and we turn that upside-down image into a sound, an ‘upside-down’ version of the original sound.

What it does is invert the notes of the tune, which creates a different sounding tune, but it also inverts the overtones, so the instruments also sound different. This effect is unique to Photosounder, which is the only program out there that treats sounds and music entirely as images.

Music from the South Park episode, Gnomes.

Photosounder is currently only available for Windows (2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista), with Mac OS and Linux versions coming soon.

A demo version is available, with the ability to save the resulting sound to file disabled, and a small noise inserted every 3 seconds. The full version is available for 99 euros (about US$128, £87, C$160, AU$195 depending on the exchange rates).