One of the sections in Brendan Dawes’ book is about generating images from music.
Whilst messing about with the “North by Northwest” images (see previous blog post), I began to wonder if you could create music from images?
Anyway, here’s the first 90 seconds of my replacement soundtrack for “North by Northwest” :-)
It was created by grabbing a frame from the movie every half a second and working out the average colour of the frame. That colour is then split into its red, green and blue (RGB) components, and their values are used to generate a guitar tablature file which is pumped into the MIDI::Tab Perl module. The first chunk of the tab looks like this…
D6: --1-5---3-4-4-4-4---4-4---3-4---3-3-3-
A3: 0---1-2-3-4-4-----4-----4-----4-----4-
E2: 0-----0-1---1-----1-----1-----1-----1-
Going for a 3/4 timing seemed to give the most pleasing output. That seemed appropriate, as Hitchcock often used waltzes in his films :-)
I wasn’t too sure just how it would sound, but it’s actually not too bad!