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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."
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.
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.
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Interesting way to get people to buy CDs instead of downloading them... how many people would actually download a song of Britney Spears' if pictures of her came with the songs that you buy? Yeah, the RIAA should just try this...
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Also, his music is amazing.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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.
The image is not destroyed -- it just morphs into an image of Jack Valenti.
Breakfast served all day!
This is news?
I always see faces when listing to Aphex Twin if I sit there for long enough... although sometimes it helps to be in the right frame of mind.
:)
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
JINX!
Breakfast served all day!
Sorry boys and girls, you have to buy the CD if you want to see it
or you could just look at the top of the linked story -- Picture Gallery (3)
S
Shorten, or a .SHN file, is lossless audio compression that works quite well and dominates the bootleg scene, get the neccesary tools here.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
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!
Christian Music will have crosses, doves, and christian fish encoded into the signal, which will probably improve the music.
Gothic music will encode pentagrams, broken crosses, and tributes to Jack Chick, but nobody will notice because it's all screaming anyway.
Country music will include images of pickup trucks, cowboy hats, and liquor bottles, but since country fans are all hicks, they will never be discovered.
The RIAA will mandate that all music have encoded into it pictures that won't survive reencoding, but that, when translated to mp3, will crash your computer.
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
Yeah!
another site regarding this was linked on memepool a few weeks ago.
.wav that contains the face.
http://chaos.yerbox.org/face/
they've got a spectrography program, as well as the
now, this is a great reason to buy the actual CD. I'd pay $15 for that. Then again, I also LIKE Aphex Twins' music. On the other hand, it's not very useful if it's copy-protected and won't play on a PC. I think there's a lesson to be learned here for both the RIAA and the "cartel-protest" crowd.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I found this about a year and a half ago, oddly enough at about 3 im the morning... scared the hell out of me but was the neatest find. I was watching songs in winamp with the voiceprint plugin that comes with it. Think it would make neat wallpaper.
I took a screenshot and sent it to my friends and we looked around the web but couldnt find anyone else who had come across this. I think the song was "Complex Mathematical Equation" but i cant remember...
That's a good way for some random band to boost their sales: encode moving pictures of a scantily clad pop-star dancing (or in some other way gyrating) into their music. People would have to buy their CD, and as a bonus they get some music. And as a bigger bonus, they get pictures of Britney...
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Isn't this just asking for another method of circumvention? That is, if it is to be used as some form of copy protection. Someone could encode the images as .mpg and the music as .mp3, and offer them both up for download, and the downloader could combine them at his end if he really wanted to have the image with the sound. Or just keep them separate. Shouldn't be too tough, right?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I wonder if Yanni has goatse.cx pictures embedded in his music. Think of the children!
Doesn't Winamp run only on Windows? Surely there must be software for a free OS that does this.
The sad part is that true artists like AFX are pretty much ignored and panned by the lables and the radio stations while crap get's all the airplay.
Sorry, but AFX has always been much more a musician than the rest of the mot there on pop-radio. Just like Moby,NutralMilk hotel, and the rest of the "underground" they all have more talent in their toenails than every artist that get's big-station radio play.
And that my friends is exactly why I am proud of my wierd music collection. (I admit..it's wierd... AFX is wierd.. by popular standards...)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seemed to work for me. I too the wav file linked off the page linked from the Wired article, encoded it to MP3, and then decoded the MP3 to a new WAV file.
The face is still there. A little distorted and not quite as clear but it's still there and still recognizable.
Of course if you encoded it as a 64k or 32k mp3 things might not work as well but since I can hear the difference at those levels I don't mess with MP3 that compressed unless I really need it.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Anybody who wants to make their own funkiness on, say Windows, try Coagula.
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?
There's a hilarious fictional IRC session featuring Richard James as the egomanical moderator. I reckon I'm not getting even half of the jokes but it's still a riot.
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?
--
DeCSS hidden in a song's spectrogram
Will I retire or break 10K?
Could it be Jesus' face????
aphex twin/RDJ is quite the geek, making his own synths and coding some of his own software for use in his music....it's one of the reasons it takes him ages to get a fucking album out, apparently. there was a recent interview where he said he'd lost an mp3 player that was loaded with tons of his songs (and i think squarepusher demos too -- aphex and pusher are friends,) like two albums' worth of unreleased material he was sorting through....just left the player on a plane and that his paranoia over getting the songs released on the 'net was one impetus for releasing his latest album, druqks. more proof that mp3s have changed artists' modus operandi, even if it's not all artists.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
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.
Winamp ran excellently in Wine when I tried it. Well enough that I used it instead of any MP3 Player I found that was made for Linux.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
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.
That is very cool, i'm impressed. The output looks like something an old dot matrix would have made. Am i right in looking at it that the text is made up like that, where each 'row' is a sin wave at some frequency?
-Jon
this is my sig.
Plus - it's about time this guy got some credit.
I wish I read this thread earlier so I could get some mad karma on all my AFX links. As you can tell by my nickname I'm some sort of fuct up fan of his.
Oh well - not the end of the world.
I'm just sick of my submissions getting turned down by slashdot editors and then the article comes up a week later. Bah.
I wrote a quick app that allows embedding of an image in a similar way, and have verified that neither encoding to mp3 nor encoding to ogg destroys the image. I don't know where Wired got the idea, but they're wrong.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense too: changing the frequency components of the sound so radically that the image is no longer visible would mean that the music sounds totally different too. mp3 and ogg are lossy, but they're not THAT destructive.
Some points - as others have mentioned, mp3 encoding does not get rid of the face - it is still spooky.
And one of the standard visualisation effects on the empeg shows it beautifully.
What's even weirder is it doesn't sound too nasty, musically. Every time I've tried to draw pics in the waveform it's sounded harsh and metallic.
Yawn, this AFX face thing is old news. I heard about it months ago and it's been fairly common knowledge among AFX fans for awhile now. Oh, well.
However, I've been looking for other songs with odd spectrographs. The most recent contender has been the track "A is to B as B is to C" on geogaddi, the most recent Boards of Canada LP. Nothing as obvious as a face, but it has some strange effects, plus something apparently hidden in the high frequencies (at around 15000Hz, if I remember correctly). Anyone have any idea what this is? (You can view an image of the spectrograph here).
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Clever.
Cool ? yes and is available for macs here
I'm in a "Computer Science and Engineering" program; we have to take a couple of EE courses in addition to the regular CS workload.
One of the classes (third-year) was "Signals and Systems", which had us calculating Fourier series and transforms by hand.
So, ha.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That's awesome. While I will be the first to testify to the brilliance of his music, I have to say that no one can title a tune like he can. Obscure computing references, the "nonsense" titles from drukqs (sp?)...
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
i sincerely doubt that he even knew about the copy protection before it happened. he releases most of his music through either Warp Records or Rephlex Records both are non-riaa affiliated and have a history of treating their fans/customers well. warp used to license their music out to other labels in other countries. for instance, aphex twin is on sire in the US. now, at least in part due to licensing out acts like aphex twin, autechre, and boards of canade, warp has a us division, and rephlex has us distribution through caroline distribution. aphex twin's latest album, "drukqs" was released in the us on sire, because they were still under contract. (alhtough i thought i heard somewhere that that was the last album under the contract. we'll see who releases aphex albums in the future.)
it's worth noting that sire IS an riaa member. while warp included the windowlicker video in quicktime on the windowlicker single, (actually the windowlicker was released as a 2-parter, and the video was on part 2. but multi-part singles never go over well in the us.) sire used an edited mpeg of the video, crippled by a scheme called HyperCD.
don't blame aphex or warp for the actions of licensees.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
This item has been known for a couple years now. And contrary to the article, you don't have to have the CD.
I rip all my CD's to MP3 and it works fine. In fact, I've never actually played the CD.
Also, Chaos Machine didn't discover it, but hey, gotta try and get fame somehow!
Here is the link:
www.angelfire.com/games4/anirak/vis_test.dll
Lasers Controlled Games!
Are those tits real?
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
i have no idea who released it in germany. and sire isn't exactly one of the good ones. not anymore at least. maybe in the late 70's. it's warp and rephlex that deserve our respect.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))