Perfect Christmas Gift for a music lover..

[angelsighs]

http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/house ... aves-print

chosen song will be converted into a soundwave in the colour of your choice.. pretty nice gift. they can also make it into a keyring.

wonder if they nicked the idea from those Ladies and gents show posters from a few years back?

[semisynthetic]

I like this idea, to blend Music and Visual Art. It could be a matter of choosing the "right" song that would generate the more interesting sound wave image. Good Find, angelsighs! Several pieces come to mind that would generate an Artful Image; or simply choose a favorite track and enjoy what shows up!

[angelsighs]

it's a nice idea isn't it?

yes good point semi.. I guess it's important to think whether a particular song would produce a pleasing waveform.. with a lot of the super compressed 'brickwalled' production these days, many songs would just look like a block of sound!

I think Spread Your Wings would be good

or maybe Like Herod by Mogwai

[semisynthetic]

There are many vinyl recordings that have such beautiful waveforms on the Disc itself; this would be problematic to capture an image from, but one example that came quickly to mind was an LP called "Black Mass - by Lucifer", c. 1970 on UNI. Despite the satanic overtones of the Title and "performer(s)", this is a beautiful recording. There are such extreme sounds on this recording, that they show up physically very clearly upon viewing the surfaces of the disc.

I do like this Idea that you have shared with us, but I favor the analogue viewing of sound waves if possible; it would be far more difficult to accomplish than to generate an image digitally, but it is very pretty to see actual waveforms. It is so easy to pull up a digitized piece from a digital "library", and view and print what is created. I am sure there are methods that can help interchange analogue - digital or vice versa. If anyone wants to try another method, I often played around with an oscilloscope and a pen-printer used for printing out IR (infrared) Spectrometer info and by adjusting just the speed the paper moves on the printer, you can create some lovely pieces. If you have a multiple-pen printer, with an assortment of colors, it can really be very nice, especially when an oscilloscope is used to "preview" the waveform(s).

I wondered, jokingly, as I lay here, just how much would sections from the Soundtrack of "The Sound of Music" vary from Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" with the artwork generated purely digitally...

Nevertheless, what you have found is still an interesting gift Idea.