Well, MetaSynth by UIsoftware does this for ages already.
Yeah, I also saw a program to do this at least 10 years ago; freeware I think. But what I really want is a program that lets you do the opposite â change a symphony (say) into an image, that you can fool around with, and then turn back into the music again. It might have to be a specially formatted image, with a really high pixel count (to get the frequency range and precision), and maybe with a high aspect ratio (to get a high enough time length). Say 20,000 X 1,000,000. My first thought was to use a swirl tool on the image, to make some frequency bands come in before itâs supposed to, and some afterwards. Need some hefty processing power.
Anyone know of such? Once saw one for the Mac, but alas Iâm a Windows (L)user.
For anyone interested in more image-to-sound synthesis I highly recommend checking out the <a hfref+âhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANS_synthesizerâ>ANS Synthesizer.
Itâs a 70 year old analog hardware equivalent to this kind of software.
Cool! Just downloaded the demo and fiddled around. Thanks! 
The method has been known for quite some time
Itâs basically just playing with different ends of the fast fourier transform.
Like a lowpass cut?
Heh, Iâve been working with music and spectrograms awhile now. Every audio effect has its own distinct visual appearance int he spectrogram.
Phasers look like sine-waves. Flangers look like big Us. Reverb looks smeary, delays look like photoshop clones, choruses can sometimes look a bit like a honeycomb pattern, auto-tuning looks like stairs.
Uh, ok, so if âFlangers look like big Us,â what I wanna know is: what looks like big Them?
[sorry; couldnât help it]
Sure, and I played with an Amiga program that did thhe same around 1990.
But THIS works in the browser.
On my phone.
I remember playing whatever files in winamp. Someone concatenated an mp3 file to the tail of a jpg, which would have made for a great âfind you a âxâ that can do bothâ if the meme were around back then.
Like anything you can do with a paint program!
Phasers look like sine-waves. Flangers look like > big Us. Reverb looks smeary, delays look like photoshop clones, choruses can sometimes look a bit like a honeycomb pattern, auto-tuning looks like stairs.
It never occurred to me that such effects would have distinctive patterns like that but it makes sense.
Seems to me you can do things with a paint program that would be difficult or impossible in the time/frequency domain. Once the spectrogram is an image, the dimensions of time and frequency are now both just spatial and can be treated with the same tools that Photoshop uses. I did some experiments and it seemed to work in theory, but so far I havenât done anything that couldnât be done with a pitch shifter. But there are endless possibilities. Also need to get the full version (just used the demo so far, which doesnât save).
Figures. The Amiga was SO far ahead of its time. What is THIS that works on your phone?
The Pixel Synth in the OP. Works in my phoneâs mobile firefox - doesnât even need Chrome.
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