Using Image Editing Software to Manipulate Sound 

Woah, thank you for using my little web app in this video! I've fixed a few bugs since this video came out, but if anyone has any issues feel free to hit me up!

Ah, music to my eyes 😅

I believe the way it works is each pixel's brightness represents the amplitude of a sample of audio, and it reads left to right like a book, so when he's copying and pasting vertical layers, theoretically it would be like repeating a line of text, and that's why it chops the sample rather than blurs it. I could be wrong though, but it makes the most sense to me. Edit: got further into the video, that also explains the distortion effect, because with more contrast, bright pixels get brighter and dark pixels get darker, which should also stretch the waveform in a similar way. It's kinda hard to explain, but I can sorta visualize how it's working.

this reminds me of throwing pngs into serum wavetable

Can we just all appreciate the quality of your videos

Yo you keep disappearing and appealing out of nowhere with great content 🔥🔥🔥

Of course here a challenge... Make a song out of pngs if that's even possible.

PNG and WAV files are probably the best formats and they are my favorite for image and sound. WAV format is just uncompressed bytes of sound. PNG uses 4 bytes of data per pixel (RGBA), and usually WAV uses 4 bytes characters as far as I know, so it's perfect conversion.

can we get a round of applause for the editing in this video!

You should've tried changing the hue of the image

There is a thing called databending where you open an image in a audio software and add effects it looks super trippy!

i think the weird stuttering you're experiencing, which you speculate at 3:55 is the sample rate, is due to the actual png resolution. i suspect that each one of those delay/echo effects is occurring with every pixel in the image, so if there were some way to increase the vertical resolution of the images that the converter program uses, you could have less choppy results.

The images are read pixel by pixel from left to right, top to down, like when reading text. This means that when you stretch something to be two lines instead of one, you repeat it twice. If you wanted to stretch a sound to be twice as long, assuming it takes up only one line, you have to make the line twice as wide, keeping the first half where it is and wrapping the second half onto the next line. Let me illustrate with text. this line contains a snare: ___SNARE__ stretching it vertically gives you two of them: ___SNARE__ ___SNARE__ stretching how I described it: _____SSNN_ _AARREE___

1:50 why does that sound so damn good wow

I think that the best explanation I have seen is that it reads left to right top to bottom, red channel is probably the left channel and green is the right channel. That would make the most sense to me. That would explain the popping sounds, the color of the image, and also means it would be hard to use image editing software to actually edit it due to the way it is formatted Edit: This is almost definitely how it works. If it was formatted differently that would make editing it much easier

Now do the reverse. In audacity, if you click "import raw audio" it will accept ANY file type as audio. Ive found using weird file types with weird data (.AVI, .blend, .apk, etc.) Gives the best results.

14:08 - That reminds me of scanning through radio stations sound.

You should try converting audio to PNG to compressed jpg and back. Might be interesting.

Your content is so different from other music producers. I love that!

You just gave me the perfect tool to make weird sounds for video games, and dubstep. I can not thank you enough for this video.

0:01 omg the fucking nostalgia from the gta san andreas destination marker sound

the noise added to the song when you first tried it, it sounded cool like it had a lofi-ish vibe

These faster uploads are amazing.

Im surprised you didnt try using random images or doodling on the image

I would actually love to see a part 2 to this video! That was awesome! ^_^

There's a function in Serum where you can use PNG images as wavetables

I'm still watching, but the first thing I would do is convert the sound into a png and then BACK to audio without changes to make sure it even does that properly in the first place. Shakiness of audio might be just a png compression artefact or something like that

Omg I’ve ALWAYS wondered how this would work

I can easily imagine Andrew Huang making music with that.

how this website actually works is related to the way the golden record from voyager 1 and 2 works. how it’s related is because both ways the record’s encoded image audio and the way the image is converted into sound uses the same encoding technique. i used to have a hyper-fixation over this, which is how i know how it worked. let’s say you input an image with a height of 432 pixels. the waveform that it outputs is actually divided into 432 parts, with each part corresponding to one pixel row of the image. how the converter encodes each part of the waveform (which corresponds to one pixel row of the image as i said earlier) is by using the crests (aka peaks or high parts) and troughs (aka valleys or low parts) of the waveform as different brightnesses. crests corresponding to lighter colors of each pixel row, and troughs corresponding to darker colors of each pixel row. so the converter scans through each row of the image left-to-right and outputs them as one part of the waveform. the converter scans through the image and outputs them as a waveform until it completely finishes generating. this is how the images are converted into waveforms.

I can’t believe I’m watching this in the middle of class

10:06 "That's a bulgy boi" Beat proceeds to shart on everything.

The end result had a faint Daft Punk kind of vibe to it. Sounds interresting, could be a great thing for sound design.

do this but try changing the orange color completely to blue or green or something. that could be really interesting

I love how the song at end actually sounds pretty good lol, btw can you try making music in a video editor like premiere?

This video was made with *red heart emoji*

14:20 flipped all those layers and ended up sounding like a Blanck Mass song

have you found out about blob opera yet? I spent a couple days going through a bunch of covers people made with the 'experiment'. its an a.i powered choir.

- Hey man, what's your DAW ? - Have you heard of MS Paint

WAIT THIS IS EVERYBTING IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR

this could be used to hide a message in an ARG :D .

You gotta drop the full release of the first finished product at the end that was actually sounding good 🙌

now you can save music to paper!

guy literally be making beats in Microsoft paint. i thought excel was something, but now the music community has peaked. this is the ultimate DAW

Nobody: 3:39 Travis Scott: thats fire 🔥🔥

I never thought of anything like that. But what really unexpected for me is that all this stuff makes sense, and it’s own laws.

now i have some sounds to use in my bandcamp experimental album!

why is this actually kinda cool

Levi with another banger as usual

You are a madman. I love it.

I am loving the upload consistency recently! Keep up the amazing work!

sending stems as pngs is actually a great idea

This is a really cool concept. I wonder what adding like visual distortion does to a guitar like does it actually distort it?

Thanks. I'm glad someone figured this out

dang, levi is on a roll

my friend : what songs you listen to me : it’s complicated...

Aw yea i used to do this all the time as a kid. I loved using it for data moshing

Now I can definitely prove I can hear images

1:36 sounds so lofi 3:39 *TRIPLE DRUMS* 7:01 poppy guitar and drums 10:59 DISTORTED BOI

i wonder what a picture of you would sound like XD

Definitely a lot of fun and quite useful as well. Thanks a lot! Great video.

Awesome video! You should have compared the original loop to one that was converted to an image and then directly converted back into sound so you can see how much information is lost in the conversion process every time

This could be crazy for making glitchy/weirdcore/hyperpop/experimental tracks

My boy direct!

4:20 (not intended) that would make a good sound for like a machine gun.

You're a legend, you should make a skillshare course because you're amazing at this! I'd love to learn from you!

I did made dubstep glitch sounds way back in my college day's . It was fun . But you must use EXE files or folders files . Something of that jazz .

12:26 laser gun yes

a DAW you never thought you needed.

Another upload so quick??? This is great! Love the videos!

Now you gotta make a song where you hide some memes or something in it. The sounds come out very strange though when you use a picture and I think it may have to be black and white. I played around with doing it a while ago but couldn’t find a good way to hide the sounds without it seeming obviously out of place

I use png to wav to add a visual watermark to my sound effects in the same way Mick Gordon made the pictures in the Doom soundtrack.

Jeez man you just keep coming back with bangers

An assault both on the eyes and the ears. Magnificent 😂😂

2:09 the best banger dubstep ever

I literally used this to make dubstep growls 🤣 super sick wavetables

Yo that's so cool

You are crazy. I'm here for it.

I have that same shirt.... i get compliments on it every time i wear it. So... nice shirt! Lol

What the fuck, this is so cool!

If you want multiple layers to show up the same amount, you can’t set the opacity for 25 for all of them. You need to make the bottom 100, the second 50, the third 25, and so on. Otherwise the top layer shows well but the lower ones are all fighting to be seen

Do this again, but with your knowledge from this video! This could give a unique style if mastered!

Heeyy levi i am here to BEG YOU to do an extended version of the old outro that sounds like a distorted violin I just love it too much

This is insanely cool

This would be a beast for Lofi hiphop

I think the way you are assuming the audio got encoded as the image might be the reason the experiments didn't sound great. I'm pretty sure the audio is encoded into one single horizontal line of pixels that is then wrapped vertically. It should be read right to left, and then when you reach the end of the line on the right it continues on the next row on the far left. Think of it like reading this comment. If you did a vertical motion blur all you are doing is duplicating letters vertically across words in different lines. Example: This is a sentence about ducks. Quack! Gets incoded as: This is a sentence about ducks. Quack! Turns into: Tahbiosu t idsu cak sse.n tQeunaccek ! Tahbiosu t idsu cak sse.n tQeunaccek ! Which would turn back into audio as: Tahbiosu t idsu cak sse.n tQeunaccek ! Tahbiosu t idsu cak sse.n tQeunaccek ! Rather than: TTThhhiiiss iiisss aaa ssseeennnttteeennnccceee aaabbbooouuuttt ddduuuccckkksss... QQQuuuaaaccckkk!!! This is why everything got stuttery. Because you are blurring the sounds vertically across multiple rows selection of time stacked vertically. Even when blurring horizontally, the blur doesn't wrap with the pixels so the audio at the left and right edges gets messed up. If you could unwrap this image into a single horizontal row of pixels I bet the blur might sound a bit more like reverb.

2 Levi Niha's is a lot of Levi Niha's

Very cool idea

Thanks for this video Helped me a lot

great experiments. you could use izotope rx8 to get rid of the pops

14:05 when you accidentally create an EATEOT track

Alternative title: *How the disk 11 is created*

This is awesome and why are the images always orange???

Very sick vid honestly 👌

So this is what they mean by hearing images. Thank you sir

i did this to one of my pngs and it electrified me lol

that random sample is used in a song with 122M hahaha Rels B, Dellafuente - BUENOS GENES

This will be future music production

there are actually other ways to databend. if you convoert an image to bmp(bitmap) and throw them into audacity you can do some pretty funky stuff.

Photoshop is my favorite music program