In an attempt to translate the visual world into audio I wondered what if the shapes of objects could be contours of a sound wave. As an experiment I took the contour of an oak leaf and turned it into a wave form.
I first found an outline of an oak leaf online then cut it in two:
Next, using computer vision (openCV in Cinder), I analyzed the image for feature points:
Using javascript I converted these points from a csv into a table that Max/MSP could use as a waveform. Since some of the points are over/under each other (and with a waveform you can’t have more then one value happening at any given point in time) the waveform in max has some interesting striations:
With an oscilloscope the wave coming from the synthesizer looks like:
It sounds real buzzy:
But in layers and with some filtering it can have a nice effect: