Artist - Aphex Twin

Today I want to talk about Aphex Twin or Richard David James. I suppose I really only want to talk about one of his songs that relates to my work. While he does do photography for some of his album covers, most of his art lies in his music. Not only is it some of the most influential and original techno music there is, but he has expanded it into the visual realm as well. In his song Mathematical Equation he has converted an image of his face into sound. When the song is played back through a spectral analyzer the tones of the song produce an image in the spectogram.

Image of spectrogram in Aphex Twin - Mathematical Equation at 5:27

And here is a video for the analysis the rest of that song, the face happens at 5:27.


I think this is amazing and didn't know it could be done. I will have to find out how to convert an image to sound like that, it would definitely be something I might want to use in the future. It is very explicative of some of the things I've been talking about, that there are no borders, that there are only places where seemingly different things weave together. It could also be used to talk about the subliminal. I wonder if it is possible to show a whole story in a song. Of course the sounds that this produces are not really the sounds I would choose to use musically so I wonder if there are any other different ways of achieving something like this.