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I would like to recreate a sound from a picture of a soundwave.

But i see a lot of theorical question.

And im not sure its possible....

I mean, it is possible to create a sound...

But to make the sound as close as possible of the original one, sound a bit harder.

Most of the time when you see soundwave as art...

It's really time compressed.

I would love to have a tatoo of the soundwave of someone important to me that say a word to me.

And then with my smartphone point the camera at the tatoo and hear it again.

But i have a lot of question about this.

First how can i get the periodicity? Per pixel i will probably got a lot of periode. How can i decide the lenght of my whole song? I have a sound wave but no legend. so it can be 1s or 160s compressed i can never know....

Let's say i cheat and decided my application always says from start to end of my soundwave i have 1s (1s is enough for a 'I love you' for exemple)

Ok so i have my length total so with open cv i can check my image and reconise bar height every pixel. And then with my pixel length and the fact i know it's one second i can start to generate sound.

But how can i decided.... the corresponding value to the Heigh in pixel? I don't have frequency value correspondance. 12px heigh can be 20Hz as 20 000Hz

Ok let's say i define a value to the max height of my sound wave to the real value of my sound. Cause i use a sound i choose. So i can set a reference value and use it to get other value.

I now parse a picture to get a compressed sound and i have some value of Hz in an intervall of second.

Lets say i have a 10cm tatoo of a 1s sound. each cm is 0.1s

And in each cm i can make like... 10 bar maybe 20 (one bar is 1mm or 0.5mm possible in tatoo right?) Let say 20 ...

so i have info of Hz every 0.005s

and let say i decide i start up and and bottom i hav two info in 0.005s the up and bottom one So i have one info for 0.0025s

That make a sound at 400Hz... And... classical sound are know to be around 44 100Hz....

Will the sound i produce be at little close to the real one? Or does it will only be a little noise?

(English is not my mother tongue feel free to improve i will try my best to reformule if you didn't understand something)

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  • $\begingroup$ Just a silly idea, so not posted as an answer. QR codes can hold up to 7000 bytes of binary data. Write a program for smartphones that reads QR codes, and plays back the (short) audio file encoded in the QR code. You could use low bit rate uncompressed audio, or use something like the speex codec for longer messages. You then need an encoding program to create the QR code, and a really good tattoo artist accurately put it to skin. You need the smart phone program and encoder even if you were to go the spectrogram route. $\endgroup$
    – JRE
    Oct 28, 2017 at 9:09
  • $\begingroup$ There are also programs that combine a QR and a picture. You could (maybe) combine a (very small) compressed recording with the picture. The picture is, naturally, just a pixelized version of the picture, but might be good enough to recognize the person. $\endgroup$
    – JRE
    Oct 28, 2017 at 9:14
  • $\begingroup$ The soundWave seems cooler than the QR codes ^^ But... If soundWave is not possible QR code can be a possibility $\endgroup$
    – Jebik
    Oct 30, 2017 at 9:04

2 Answers 2

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I don't think "I love you" is doable with a sound wave image, because that's already very roughly about 200 cycles of the fundamental frequency of the voice, and you need also the harmonics so that it sounds right and can be understood. Too much horizontal resolution is needed to pack that into a tattoo.

You could probably pull it off as a spectrogram.

I've seen ads for a commercial service that presumably stores at a server a database of sound clips each associated with a sound wave image. Then their phone app sends the tattoo photo to the server and plays back the sound clip associated with the image that most resembles the tattoo photo. Technically that's not far different from having the sound clip number tattooed as a bar code.

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    $\begingroup$ See that, that how i think about it But i don't like the server and company that keep everything and you cannot go out of their product... you need to be taoued by their partner... $\endgroup$
    – Jebik
    Oct 27, 2017 at 18:15
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    $\begingroup$ And if the business stops operating one day, so does the tattoo. $\endgroup$ Oct 27, 2017 at 18:25
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I know it's an old question but someone above mentioned QR codes to store the data. It would be slightly less permanent (subject to companies closing or whatever) but you could have a QR code just save a link to the sound. People snap a pic and it takes them to the recording. I actually had an idea about using this to sell concert shirts. Each one could have a QR code, with multiple codes out in the wild linking to different songs and fans could walk up to other fans they saw with the shirt and use a QR reader on their phone to get the music. The idea was that a lot of people go to shows with friends so it would be a way to help fans of a particular group develop a clique with other fans, sort of a fun way to build a social network around a band at the low cost of giving away some music (but also helping sell t-shirts/merch.)

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