Peter B. L. Meijer is a researcher whose work includes image-to-sound sensory substitution. His 1992 engineering paper described how a grayscale image could be encoded as a time-varying sound pattern.[ref]
The design scans image columns from left to right. Horizontal position becomes time within a scan, vertical position selects an audio frequency, and brightness sets an oscillator's amplitude. For example, a bright point high on the right produces a relatively high-frequency component late in the scan. Different rows contribute superposed tones. This provides an explicit encoding whose mathematical information content can be studied separately from how well a listener learns to interpret it.[ref]
An experimental system for auditory image representations by Peter B. L. Meijer. Image-to-Sound Mapping, figure 1 and finite-duration discussion
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