Most Frequently Asked Question

What is this project's purpose?

The original idea that prompted me to create this project was that if we can synthesise a spectrogram into a sound, then one could very well learn how to create all types of sounds by learning how to do so from studying spectrograms of recorded sounds, and thus ultimately be able to create an entire electronic music track from scratch with only that knowledge, a sheet of paper and pencil (or an image-editing program).

The second idea behind the ARSS is to bring the power of image editing tools into the realm of sound edition. I was very disappointed when I realised as a child that - as I thought - the only ways to extract a precise sound from other sounds was to cut it in the time domain and to filter it in the frequency domain. To me that was as if you only could edit images by cutting them horizontally and vertically. While traditional sound edition techniques are good enough for mostly everything we need, I couldn't help but wonder what would be the possibilities if one could edit sounds like images, and I can really see a potential in the ARSS for, for example, filtering sounds out by blacking out areas of a spectrogram, affecting the sharpness of certain features, modifying the image's histogram using curves, stretching things to make them sound longer, and generally anything else one could think of experimenting with.

In fewer words, this project's purpose is to embody the groundbreaking paradigm-shifting vision that sounds are images, and that by treating them as such a vast new world of possibilities opens up to us.