Ever wondered what an image would sound like?

rgb-music-fail
We found an interesting little blurb about a software program that converts images into music. Specifically, it “converts the RGB, Red, Green, and Blue, values of every pixel of an image and plays a 3 note harmony based on the RGB values. It reads the pixels from top left to bottom right playing a song a long the way.” According to señor willburns1 on his blog (link), “most of the time it seems like set a child loose on a piano but it is sometimes pretty cool.”

Intrigued, I thought I’d spice up this Friday afternoon with audio created from some of my favorite images, but alas! it was not to be. It seems there’s a patent on this technology, and Kenji Kojima, the creator of <a href="RGB MusicLab, was told to stop:

Dear people,
I was informed that I had to remove RGB MusicLab from the web site from a person who had a patent that enabling the interpretation of color as music. I have never heard it was a patent and believed it belonged to all humankind. However I have to obey the US law.

Kenji Kojima

Some samples are still online, if MIDI is your thing.