Meta Synth

MetaSynth plays pictures as sound.

For a pixel, apply these mappings:

x-coordinate

point in time at which to make a sound

y-coordinate

pitch at which to make a sound

luminance

volume

red

left stereo component

green

right stereo component

blue

ignored (used to add "comments")

A third dimention not shown in the picture assignes a voice to each pixel: sine wave, wavetable syth, fm synth or sample.

MetaSynth provides painting package functionality to edit bitmaps, and will perform musically sensible transformations of various kinds. It will sample sounds (the pictures generated by speech are fascinating!), has software FM and wavetable synthesis built in. One of the examples is a short piece of Bach: you can see the melodic lines intertwining to form harmonies right there in the picture!

There's a free demo available, and loads more information at[1].