An up-to-date look at free software and its makers
PROJECTS ON THE MOVE
Soundmural delivers sound to match an image, and the new Hacker Key delivers code to match the coder. We’ll also look at AKFQuiz, Linux on the Ultrasparc T1, and the Debian GFDL controversy.
Media artists have always enjoyed experimenting with the interface between different forms of perception. The computer is a particularly useful tool in this field, as it is a hive of digital data that can easily be used for tasks not originally envisaged by its creators. The Soundmural [1] program by Kurt Rosenfeld interprets images as if they were spectrogram views of sound files and saves the matching sounds as wave files. Onomatopoiea A spectrogram provides a graphical representation of a frequency spectrum. In a monochrome representation, the louder frequencies are dark, the quieter ones are light, and gaps are represented as whitespace. Colored representations use a similar approach but apply darker and lighter colors.