Pixel Music

What it does

A sequencer that reads a photograph as a grid of pixels and plays it as notes. A playhead crosses the image left to right, top down or in a shrinking square, and each pixel sets pitch, velocity and note length, mapped from average RGB, luminance, hue or saturation. Grid size, key, scale and note rate sit on top of that. Several photos run at once, each page with its own instrument and its own MIDI destination.

In the demo

Jade plays a piece built from photos of channel regulars, then starts fresh with one image, working through grid size, traversal direction and the mapping page so each change is audible. She crops a photo so only part of it plays, toggles single pixels off, records a finger-drawn loop over the top, then drives Speldosa and a saxophone from separate pages in AUM.

Worth knowing

There are only two built-in sounds, so most of the work here goes out as MIDI to other instruments. Dark photos crowd the notes into a narrow range, which Jade runs into more than once.