Page on bastwood.com describing the Aphex Face, the image of Aphex Twin's face hidden in a spectrogram of his music.
HN links it whenever hidden images in audio spectrograms or musician easter eggs come up, citing it as the standard example.
>C code is too "random" to produce nice images
In a world where it is possible to compute a file that contains its own MD5, I wouldn't bet on this. Wish I could find the link, there was some feted programmer who had a friend that bet him such a thing was not possible. He proceeded to write an algorithm that found such a file by brute force.
I wouldn't count on the eventual C being pretty though.
See also: electronic musicians hiding pictures in their music http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10
It's become somewhat of a tradition among electronic musicians to embed graphics into spectrograms, the most widely known example being Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" (1999). A few examples, including that one:
http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10
There must be precursors of the practice before the advent of computer music, or even digital/electronic music production altogether, but I can't recall any; I'd love to be pointed to them.
Kind of neat.
Heres an image of the solution, for anyone who doesn't want to try it themselves.
http://i43.tinypic.com/mjmi47.jpg
the name of the .wav gives it away, and I visualized it using one of foobar2000's default visualizations. A more advanced tool would probably give you a better resulting image.
Reminds me of aphex twin putting things in his tracks (http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php)
First "Aphex Twin Face" post! http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10
But also, I love secret messages and easter eggs - even if they aren't mathematically secure! I try to smuggle in an easter egg or two to everything I touch. Does anyone have go-to resources for entertaining ciphers, hidden messages, or interesting stories like this? I think it's fascinating.
Something similar has been done on wavs e.g. when Aphex Twin hid his own face iniside the windowlicker track: http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10
Reminds me of this article on Aphex Twin (and others) embedding images in spectrograms: http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php