Arjun Gupta is doing a Masters in Digital Media from Drexel University, Philadelphia PA. His thesis is called ‘Music in Images’ and it is based on algorithmic music composition from digital images and allows visual art (or visual data) to be transformed into music art (or sound data) through the application of an algorithmic filter. This project presents a new approach towards algorithmic music composition where the music is composed using the pixel values of digital images. Arjun says ‘The application of my project is viewable online and I am looking to get feedback on it (link given at the bottom of this post). I am writing this email to request you for your viewpoint regarding the application of this project for exploring relationships between images, computer generated music and human emotional interpretation.
Please read through my project description and view my project. I would deeply appreciate your feedback on it.’
Application Info: The application makes use of image data, such as: pixel Color, Saturation, Brightness, and qualities like: Overall Image Brightness, Color Variation and Prominent Colors. Each of the above properties contribute towards composition of the music. The song attributes controlled by them include: Melody generation, Durations, Cord Generation, Chord Progression, Tempo,Scale and Transposition. The theory behind the translation of image attributes to music attributes is based on previous works done in the field of psychology, in the topic: perceptual associations of audio frequency and music modes with hue, saturation and brightness. In addition to this, there are certain translation techniques which are based on my artistic sense.
The analogy for Image to Music translation used here is:
Pixels : Similar Color regions : Overall ImageNotes : Chords : Scale
This application works best for abstract images. It tends to produce calmer music with smoother images, or with less color/brightness variation, and more complex music with high variation images. The overall brightness also adds an effect on the music.
Please do check it out here and leave me some feedback :http://www.musicinimages.com