A Basic Study on the Conversion of Sound into Color Image using both Pitch and Energy

Abstract

This study describes a proposed method of converting an input sound signal into a color image by emulating human synesthetic skills which make it possible to associate an sound source with a specific color image. As a first step of sound-to-image conversion, features such as fundamental frequency(F0) and energy are extracted from an input sound source. Then, a musical scale and an octave can be calculated from F0 signals, so that scale, energy and octave can be converted into three elements of HSI model such hue, saturation and intensity, respectively. Finally, a color image with the BMP file format is created as an output of the process of the HSI-to-RGB conversion. We built a basic system on the basis of the proposed method using a standard C-programming. The simulation results revealed that output color images with the BMP file format created from input sound sources have diverse hues corresponding to the change of the F0 signals, where the hue elements have different intensities depending on octaves with the minimum frequency of 20Hz. Furthermore, output images also have various levels of chroma(or saturation) which is directly converted from the energy.