MetaSynth for Windows? For Free?

Sometimes people ask for a Mac version of the The vOICe for Windows, but there are no plans to create that. Vice versa, other people have asked for a Microsoft Windows version of MetaSynth. Like The vOICe for Windows, MetaSynth plays an image by scanning it from left to right, turning every pixel into an oscillator. Time (as well as stereo panning) is assigned to the horizontal axis, while frequency (perceived as pitch) is mapped to the vertical axis. Brightness of pixels determines their sound volume (amplitude).

Now The vOICe for Windows is not meant as a sound design or experimental music tool, but as an experimental synthetic vision engine for blind people! So The vOICe and MetaSynth have very different aims and ambitions, and they are not competing products. Nevertheless, if you keep this in mind, you can play with many of The vOICe's sound synthesis parameters as available in its menu Edit | Soundscape Preferences, you can import image files (GIF, JPEG, ...) via its file requester under Control-O (or you can use your mouse to drag and drop images on The vOICe window), and you can save soundscapes as WAV sound files by pressing Control-S. Just give it a try if you are interested in Windows-based sound design.

Moreover, The vOICe for Windows is meant for sonification of live camera images from a webcam or other video capture source, giving sound design and audio effects a whole new and fully interactive dimension! If you use The vOICe for Windows for such purposes, please give credit to the source, to help spread the underlying concepts and intended application area!

By the way, if you wish to interactively draw a sound, you can also play online with the Java applet named The vOICe Sonification Applet, which runs on any platform/browser that has a suitable Java engine, such as Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and many other operating systems.

The vOICe for Windows translates images from your PC camera (webcam) into sounds that you hear via your stereo headphones, thereby targetting synthetic vision for the totally blind by means of a wearable computer. The vOICe for Windows has been available since January 1998. The vOICe approach was originally published in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 112-121, Feb 1992: P.B.L. Meijer, ``An Experimental System for Auditory Image Representations.'' This paper was next selected for reprint in the 1993 IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, pp. 291-300. Awarded U.S. Patent 5097326, on an "image-audio transformation system", filed July 27, 1990: ``In a device for converting visual images into representative sound information especially for visually handicapped persons an image processing unit is provided with a pipelined architecture with a high level of parallelisum. An image is scanned in sequential vertical scanlines and the acoustical representatives of the scanlines are produced in real time. Each scanline acoustical representation is formed by sinusoidal contributions from each pixel in the scanline, the frequency of the contribution being determined by the position of the pixel in the scanline and the amplitude of the contribution being determined by the brightness of the pixel.''