HappyQuark
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2015–2020
5:52 · 477K views · May 25, 2009
A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.
HN uses it as the canonical example of hiding images in audio spectrograms.
3 comments from Hacker News
I often wonder how much the multi-sensory aspect plays into it. When I see an image, I don't really process it as an image, I map that visual cue into the full gamut of sensory memories (?) of that object. I could write a page worth of these descriptive meatspace 'vectors' that are invoked when i see a banana and color my interpretation of its context. If my understanding is remotely correct, an RNN's view of a banana is basically like the face in Aphex Twin's Equation - this video (headphone users beware). No qualitative or quantitative information about the object, just a certain tone of integer triplets in a cacophony of noise. It seems like a many-dimensional view of the world around us is going to be necessary for systems to more effectively intuit about interacting with it. It could be something we synthetically inject or we may need to give our models new senses they can use to extract their own meaning.
Aphex Twin had hidden spectrogram images in some of his tracks in the past, unfortunately I think they are not well preserved by multiple steps of compression/reencoding to youtube videos. [LINK] this video
This might be a widely known secret by now, but here's an example of musician Aphex Twin hiding his face in a spectrogram of one of his songs: this video