Mangling Images With Audio Effects

Ever wonder what those snapshots you took of your trip to Paris would look like if you ran them through a Proco RAT or a Boss Overdrive? How about a BF-3 flanger? [Robert Foss] wrote in with this nifty little script (GitHub) that processes images as if they were audio files so that you can try it out without investing in a rack of analog pedals. Test your audio/visual DSP intuition and see if you can name the images without looking at the effects.

If you know your Linux command-line utilities, there’s really not much to it — scroll down to the very bottom of the script to see how it’s done. ffmpeg converts the images to YUV format, which works much better than RGB for audio processing, and then sox adds the audio effects. Another trip through ffmpeg gets you back to an image or video.

OK, it’s cheating because it’s applying the audio effects inside the computer, but nothing’s stopping you from actually taking the audio out and running it through that dusty Small Stone. Of course, once you’ve got audio outside of the computer, the world is your oyster. Relive the glorious 70’s when video artists made works using souped-up audio synthesizers. If you haven’t seen the Sandin Image Processor or the Scanimate in action, you’ve got some YouTubing to do.

Filed under: video hacks

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