Digital photographs are nothing more than a series of digital characters. So are sound files.

I’ve gone way back, using a source image that is almost 100 years old. First I scanned it, converting the analog photo that was printed on paper into a digital file on my computer. A file that can be viewed using some software but is fundamentally a series of electrical zeros and ones on my hard drive. Since it is a digital string of charges, I can also treat it as a sound file to be heard.

When I treat it as a sound file, I can throw in effects and convert it back into a visual that displays the impact of the inserted sound ‘data’. First I add a ‘Pluck’ to the image file and generate this version of the picture. Turns out one Pluck adds no colour, but creates both a horizontal and vertical skew of the image.

What happens if we relabel them? We can hear pictures and see sounds.

The people in this picture lived before we had digital sound. Back in the 1920’s and 30’s they were still developing a taste for music on cylinders and disks, so they probably never expected that some day you would be able to ‘hear’ their faces.

But it is a century later and we can. We also see what happens when sounds are added to image files. Each sound effect generates unique visual cues such as colours, static lines and image skews.

By adding sound effects to a picture we can add texture and colours.