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Music Meets Steganography
austad writes "Wired is running a story about how Aphex Twin has encoded a face into one of his songs. The face is visible when viewing the sound through a spectrograph. This is probably something I wouldn't want to see when coding in a dark room at 3AM. Sorry boys and girls, you have to buy the CD if you want to see it, encoding of the song into a lossy format destroys the image."
encoding of the song into a lossy format destroys the image."
I have an mp3 encoded @192kps, using the Nullsoft tiny fullscreen plugin displays the image just fine (its at the last few seconds of the 2nd track of the Windowlicker EP.
Also, his music is amazing.
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It's possible to see hidden images in the second Aphex Twin windowlicker track. Take a look here for instructions, then visit this site for a quality screenshot.
Breakfast served all day!
So, really, you'd have to dedicate some of the CD to irritating noise, like Aphex Twin must have done.
Shorten, or a .SHN file, is lossless audio compression that works quite well and dominates the bootleg scene, get the neccesary tools here.
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Yeah, but if you rip to .flac then you don't lose anything, so you could pirate and still see the face. With people using 700MB for a divx movie, sometimes even 1.4Gig, using 250MB for a .flac album is not really very much space...
graspee
You can download the 9 second wave where the face appears.. here
Also, you can download Spectrogram here
Not sure of which program in *nix can do it.. any ideas?
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Interesting point, but irrelevant, because that part of the slashdot story is completely false. (Surprise, surprise, I know) The image is almost entirely unaffected by compression.
I once wrote a program to hide printed text in a spectrogram. The first thing I encoded (after test messages such as Hello World) was efdtt from David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.
the program
efdtt on top of music from Tet*is Advance
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here is correctly displayed screenshots of the face... the spectrum needs to be logarithmic. http://spectool.mastak.com/scrshots/
What ripping quality would preserve the face?
Steps used in Cool Edit Pro with Fraunhofer plug-in:
Anybody have a good link to a spectrograph program that uses a logarithmic frequency axis?
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DeCSS hidden in a song's spectrogram
Will I retire or break 10K?
There are two images, the first is of Mr. Twin's face at about 5:48 into the song, the second is a swirl at about 6:00. You pry only saw the swirl, reason being it has a lot of blackspace and its very easy to make out swirling kind of noise. The face however, sounds like just regular old garbled Apex Twin noise.
Steganography is encoding something in another medium so as not to alter the carrier medium, like a watermark. What Aphex Twin did was to use a piece of software that converts graphics to sound (x, y, z = time, frequency, and intensity/volume) via an Inverse Fast-Fourier Transform. There is no encoding involved, the picture *is* the sound that you hear. Big difference.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Doesn't this describe music in its entirety?
That would be discounting the innumerable social, political, and cultural aspects of music, which is the entire point of music. Music as a reflection of culture, music as a medium for socio/political commentary... entire volumes could be written on just one aspect of the said uses for music.
But oh no, music is "cosmetic and pointless." Now this is very true for most pop music these days (which is probably not what you meant), but not music as a whole.
Granted, Aphex Twin isn't exactly pop music, so the point is moot anyway...
Don't mean to nitpick, but I know quite a bit about Richard D. James, and this has nothing to do with sales.
Actually, if you read the article, you'd note that this is from Windowlicker, released in 1999, and that neither RDJ nor his recording company have made any commotion about this fact.. so clearly publicity had nothing to do with it.
This guy just loves messing around. He's ridiculously creative, and is trying out new things all the time. Recently in an interview he stated that when he composes, what he does is cause himself to go to sleep for a while, imagine a piece of music while he sleeps, and then wake up and try to recreate it as best he can.
This may sound dorky or gimmicky, but it's amazing. I mean, if you are imagining the sound in a dream, it is an aural stream of conscience--you are not being inhibited at all by your abilities to use certain equipment, and hence the sound is as close to how you really want it to sound as possible, there being no such physical impediments (yes I just said the same thing multiple times. sorry, getting a point across).
he's quite a phenomenon. I love him. On his recent CD he has a few tracks of prepared piano--I'm very impressed he broke into that realm. He's also collaborated with philip glass.
He's a real creative genius.. his output spans many different styles; he is constantly coming up with new and drastically differing ideas...