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I saw this nifty art thing where they dress up the time-domain audio signal in some pretty way. https://www.etsy.com/ArtbloxShop/listing/621561709/sound-wave-art-custom-soundwave-print

My question is whether I can take a photograph of that object and somehow reconstruct the actual audio? I'm assuming that the printing and my photograph won't have the resolution to directly capture the wave data points. But I was wondering if using some basic assumptions about frequency if we could reconstruct something crude. I suspect that too much information is lost, but I was hoping there might be some clever tricks.

There is clearly some resolution of printing that would preserve enough information, but I'm wondering if we're talking about a poster-sized version of a short clip or something. That wouldn't be very practical. It would be fun to have time-domain audio hanging as art if I could take my smart phone and take a picture of it, and after some processing, play back the audio.

As an alternative, could this be done using a spectrogram? Like if that block of art displayed that instead? Or maybe some combination of that plus time-domain envelope? If I did want to represent audio as an image as part of art (maybe presume something around 8.5x11 size), is there some way I could have an app photograph it and turn it back to audio?

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In general no, there is way too much information lost

If you can constrain the audio to a reasonably small corpus of songs, phrase, keywords, etc. you may be able to train a neural network to recognize the basic envelope shape. There used to be an app that was trying to do something like this, but I can't find it anymore.

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