Open Hatch

Posts Tagged ‘Electric Sheep’

(Here is a link to view that in high definition.)

I’ve thought it might be cool to combine animations from the Electric Sheep screen saver with sounds roughly correlating to the images – by way of a reverse spectrogram. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the frequency components of something (for example, a sound), so a reverse spectrogram takes an image and breaks it into component frequencies.

The name of one program that does this for sounds (and it can do it from any image) is Coagula, which I used to make representative sounds for this video in 5 second intervals using stills from this short video to showcase the idea. I then combined these all in a Nonlinear Editor (for video) and rendered the results out to this.

The synthetic sounds Cougula makes generally sound scary, screechy, and creepy – especially with source images like this I like it.

I am downloading so many gigabytes of abstract art animations from where someone has uploaded their repository of Electric Sheep movie files (I’m in contact with this person; I’ll be uploading the ones I have for him – and for you! – to access). As I do this, the download eventually runs into an error: out of hard drive space.

Yoink!

I’ll need to move what I’ve downloaded to an external hard drive to free up space. So I connect the drive and start doing this. The computer hangs (several high octane applications open, music playing, and many high octane data transfers will do this – if your computer is a few years old). No usual attempts to unfreeze it succeed. Finally it occurs to me it’s the data transfer that is probably the real holdup; I’ve seen this setup unfreeze before if I simply disconnect the external drive to interrupt it. I disconnect it, and the instant I do so, everything else on my computer is freed up, including my music player, which proceeds to the next song in my queue, which it happens is not a song, but a video game sound effect, and this sound effect besides:

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How appropriate.

If you have not enjoyed this happenstance, you may take reprieve in the idea that it is possible you may not be a nerd. And/or that you have never played (or fully understood, as it becomes any human beings’ divine duty to understand) EARTHBOUND, the classic among classic Super Nintendo video games from which this sound effect comes, at a moment at which a very important something (someone), a bee, dies. Like.. like.. like a failed data transfer. Oh, the poetry.