Continuous image-to-sound study: brightness animates fixed-frequency sine bands.
@maru shared this instrument so you can play it in your DAW, remix it or put it on your site.
Spectral plays a picture as sound. It reads a grayscale image from left to right, and each row of the image becomes a sine tone at its own fixed pitch, high at the top and low at the bottom. Bright pixels are loud, dark ones are quiet, so the picture's shapes turn into chords, sweeps and textures.
This is a research prototype: it plays two built-in images, Portrait and Ridges, and does not yet load your own pictures.
The frequency picture in the panel shows how the 48 rows are spread across the pitch range. It is a map of the settings, not a live spectrum.
Load the Portrait Loop preset and listen to the scan in drone mode, then try Ridges Loop for clear, separate lines of pitch. Turn Drone off and play MIDI notes to transpose the picture.
Spectral is monophonic. Thin bright lines come out as clear tones, while large bright areas turn into dense, organ-like chords.
The idea is inspired by the open-source SpectroTrace; Spectral is an independent implementation.
Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.