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Frame from [Equation] - Aphex Twin Spectrogram Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

[Equation] - Aphex Twin Spectrogram

HappyQuark
Demos
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2015–2020, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN uses it as the canonical example of hiding images in audio spectrograms.

A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

“here's an example of musician Aphex Twin hiding his face in a spectrogram of one of his songs” (HN, 2020)

3 citations · Demos

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@cnvogel Jun 2015 Cites it
on HN thread Show HN: Small C Program to Convert Photos to Audio
Aphex Twin had hidden spectrogram images in some of his tracks in the past, unfortunately I think they are not well preserved by multiple steps of compression/reencoding to youtube videos. [link] [this video]
Spectrogram image hidden in Aphex Twin track.
@jcims Mar 2018 Cites it
on HN thread AI Has a Hallucination Problem That's Proving Tough to Fix
Read more
I often wonder how much the multi-sensory aspect plays into it. When I see an image, I don't really process it as an image, I map that visual cue into the full gamut of sensory memories (?) of that object. I could write a page worth of these descriptive meatspace 'vectors' that are invoked when i see a banana and color my interpretation of its context. If my understanding is remotely correct, an RNN's view of a banana is basically like the face in Aphex Twin's Equation - [this video] (headphone users beware). No qualitative or quantitative information about the object, just a certain tone of integer triplets in a cacophony of noise. It seems like a many-dimensional view of the world around us is going to be necessary for systems to more effectively intuit about interacting with it. It could be something we synthetically inject or we may need to give our models new senses they can use to extract their own meaning.

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