The sound of this image / The image of this sound

Can you make a connection between image and sound? And in what ways can you do this?

That question often occupied me. My first discovery was a website of an artist who visualizes the vibrations of a sound fragment. The disadvantage of this is that you have little influence on the generated image and there are limited possibilities to process it further.

In addition, I came across a technique from the past called SSTV. In this technique, an image is converted pixel by pixel into tones, which are then sent via radio, for example. The frequency determines the brightness of the pixels. This is the same technique that was used in fax machines. Because this method is outdated and requires a lot of equipment, I continued my search.

This is how I came across spectrograms. In this method, a column of pixels is displayed by means of different sound frequencies. I investigated what happens to the image when you edit the audio.

For my first work, Saturn, I was inspired by the extraterrestrial and the unknown. I used an image of Saturn, captured by the Cassini orbiter, and converted it into sound using a special tool. I then added audio fragments recorded from the planet itself, also by Cassini.

For my second work I wanted to experiment with double exposures, because a spectrogram could work with this. I transformed two images to sound, combined them in an audio program, and then converted the result back to image with the tool.