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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.
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)
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."
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.