Picture → sound → picture

Transform a picture into Sound

How this works

A picture is sent as a sound. Each column of the picture gets a tone of its own, and how loud that tone plays is how bright that pixel is — 480 of them sounding at once, a new row of the picture every 60 milliseconds. A second device listens, measures every tone, and draws the rows back out as they arrive. Ticking Lo-fi trades detail for reach: 320 lower tones that small speakers and cheap microphones can actually carry, taking twice as long — the listener hears which one is coming and follows.

  1. Load a picture here on Transmit. The audio is built as soon as the picture lands — the player wakes up when it is ready.
  2. Open this page on the other device, switch to Listen, and press Start listening. Do that before you press play: the sound opens with a burst the listener uses to find where each row begins, and with a reference the two ends of the picture's greys are then measured against. Miss the opening and it can only guess at both.
  3. Press play with the two devices near each other, and keep the room quiet. The picture builds from the bottom up over about half a minute.
  4. Save PNG keeps whatever arrived, at the size it arrived. Clear empties the waterfall and starts another.

The two devices are not connected to anything.

No pairing, no network, no second app. One of them makes a noise and the other one listens to it, so whatever the room does to the sound is what you see in the picture.

Picture

Choose an image or drop one here — high contrast works best

Preview

Live spectrum

Microphone

Nothing is asked for until Start listening is pressed. Stop ends the stream — the browser's recording indicator should go out with it.

Band

Where the tones are meant to land, and what the row reader is indexing with. Compare it against the live spectrum above: energy on the teal comb and nothing between its teeth is what a clean picture looks like.