Refreq – See the music, hear the images

Nine Inch Nails did some really interesting experiments where they'd produce visuals on the spectrograms of their music [1].

It's almost like refreq is bringing the same concept to the masses. I love seeing how the simple distortions in the video create an eerie feel to an otherwise normal song. This looks like a REALLY cool product. I signed up.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(album)#Promotion

refreq is a free, open source software, an experimental project, which aims to open new ways to generate music, or new sound effects

With refreq, not only can you load music files into the program, but also images. But what does that mean?

Well, after you’ve imported an .mp3, the program first analyzes the track. Once the analysis is complete, the program can then draw its frequency spectrum -- or, in other words, the image of the music.

Once the image has been created, you can play it back with refreq -- and you can actually hear the original music play!

But instead of just exploring the image you’ve generated, you can now take that image and create a whole new sound. Just export it as a .png, manipulate it with your preferred image-editing software, like Photoshop, and then import it back into refreq.After you’ve explored your own generated image, try importing a different .png or jpg. See what different patterns sound like, maybe a mandala, the floor plan of your apartment...or even the Mona Lisa! Now you can listen to these images with refreq.

When I was in college studying CS, music composition and Linguistics simultaneously (not the best plan it turns out) I dreamed of making this exact app. Thanks for this, it's amazing!