[Equation] - Aphex Twin Spectrogram
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as the canonical example of hiding images in audio spectrograms.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2015 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Cites cnvogel · 2015-06 · on “Show HN: Small C Program to Convert Photos to Audio”
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]
Cites jcims · 2018-03 · on “AI Has a Hallucination Problem That's Proving Tough to Fix”
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
Cites alchemyromcom · 2020-06 · on “With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages in Their Melodies”
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]