Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Music Meets Steganography

Posted by Hemos on from the meeting-of-the-minds dept.

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."

3 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. A way to boost sales... by 11thangel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is one of the ways musicians can boost sales and get more CD's out: include special features in the encoding. This a) doesnt hurt people who just want the music and/or get screwed over by copy protection, b) doesn't force the consumer to buy anything specific (i.e. hardware, or even the CD in the not-as-legal sense of it) and c) adds something cosmetic, pointless, but nonetheless cool.

    --

    I am !amused.
    1. Re:A way to boost sales... by Gibbys+Box+of+Trix · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The article states that the EP was released in 1999, and the face hasn't been announced by James or his record company. That hardly sounds like a publicity stunt to me.

      Aphex Twin isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea, I think you either buy this stuff or not, you're not going to be swayed to buy it because you can see a freaky face when you run it through certain software.

      I would, however, recommend Selected Ambient Works 85-92 as a gentler introduction to the man's work.

  2. Led Zep bootleg + Apple III monitor = by John+Harrison · · Score: 4, Interesting
    A vector drawn image of a guitar!

    While in college I rewired my old monitor from an Apple II. I think it was called an Apple III Monitor for some reason. Anyhow, I ran hooked my speaker wires up to the coils that controled the beam in the CRT. This caused it to draw funky patterns. One particular Led Zeppelin track would draw a guitar on the screen.

    Unfortunately the instrument being played was a harmonica. Strange that a harmonica would draw a guitar.

    Nobody would believe me when I told them this, but everyone willing to make a trip up to my room left as a believer.

    I have since written a simple WinAmp plug-in that emulates this effect. The analog way is much more neato though.

    --
    Lasers Controlled Games!