[accessibleimage] Re: Mental synthesis of images

Was this a Kandinsky or some other Bauhaus painting?

Knowing the description of the image, I can certainly synthesize a curve
from the sounds.  The "beeps" don't say "squares" to me but rather that
something in varying degrees of brightness are in those positions.  They
could just as easily be triangles or circles.  Of course, I haven't spent
more than 5 minutes with the sounds so I can't speak from an informed
position.

Have you tried a 3D audio system?  SurroundSound headphones are pretty cheap
and Microsoft has done some pretty incredible things with the latest Direct
Sound technology.  The new X-Box sounds tremendous.

Enjoy,
cdh 

 

-----Original Message-----
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[mailto:accessibleimage-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
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Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 8:32 AM
To: accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: Mental synthesis of images

Thanks Chris! You could not possibly know the
meaning of these sounds without some background
information about the mapping: The vOICe scans
any image from left to right while associating
height with pitch and loudness with brightness.
The left to right scanning is further supported
by stereo panning from left to right, like you
noticed.

The sound sample was for an abstract image with
a curve (pitch) going up and down and up again,
plus ten little squares at various positions.
On the lower left you have two of these squares
(low pitch) and a third one slightly higher
(slightly higher pitch). At the lower right of
the image there are two other little squares,
the first at the same height as the third one
on the lower left, and the second one at the
lowest height of all. However, there are also
five little squares at the top right, sounding
at high pitch on your right side. Typically it
is a bit hard to really see/hear everything at
the same time in a repeating soundscape, but as
you mentally move your attention around to the
various pitch and stereo positions, you should
be able to hear out the different components as
described above even while the soundscape itself
does not change at all! This is a bit like the 
eye saccades that the sighted use to analyze a 
view and build a mental view. Of course it takes
time and practice to become proficient at this,
and it is still much harder with real-life camera
views from the environment. I hope you had some
fun with this example.

An introductory plain ASCII text about the
approach is at the URL

   http://www.seeingwithsound.com/intro.txt

Best wishes,

Peter


Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm

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