Audio Waves That Look Like a Picture

I work in a kindergarten and there's a lot of music being made and sung. It's important for so many areas of life. Language, pronunciation, rhythm, etc.

It's also important that the children hear properly, which we can determine through small tests.

For example, we play them two notes on the piano and they have to say which one was higher and which one was lower.

One of the children knew that you could "see" sounds. This meant that you could represent music in audio waves, for example. The song "Silent Night" looks like the one in the picture.

The measure of the height of the wave is called amplitude, and the louder a tone is, the higher the wave. If a tone is quiet, there is no longer a wave.

There is also a lot of painting in kindergarten. Simple shapes, such as circles, squares or triangles, can be found in almost all the paintings, in the form of suns, houses or roofs.

Now a child has asked what a house sounds like.

I couldn't answer that question, but it didn't leave me alone.

So I tried to find a solution, which is not easy.

You need a program to edit music. I work with Audacity

Problem 1

To represent audio waves, you need either a good knowledge of math (which I don't have) or a computer program. Since I've worked with Audacity before, it seemed like a good idea to use it.

Problem 2

Tones are indicated by the amplitude. Silence is represented by an amplitude of 0.0. You don't hear anything. Louder tones have higher pitches, but are always displayed symmetrically around the zero line.

But a house with a roof has a triangular shape at the top and a square one at the bottom, so it is not symmetrical.

Problem 3

A house has a door, a window, a chimney and more. Is it even possible to take all this into account, or does it need to be simplified?

At the end of the day, it has to be a shadow image.

Once you’ve downloaded and opened Audacity. You can find the program on the Audacity website.

Click on the Generate tab and then on Tone.

In the new window, you can set the waveform, frequency, amplitude, and duration. Simply take the settings from the image and confirm with Create.

Now you've created a sound track that's just a long, blue stripe.If you play the track, you'll hear only a steady tone, the concert pitch a1 (provided you've left the frequency at 440Hz before).

You can already edit this track. Take the envelope tool. With this you can now click on the blue stripe and deform it. In the picture, you can roughly see what's happening. If you play the track now, you'll hear that the sound is louder in the higher places and quieter in the lower places, and you can't hear it at all in the narrowest places.

As you can see, the dots are always formed symmetrically around the zero line.That means you can't form the triangle for the roof, or just lie on the side.

Theoretically, you just need to lengthen the back a bit and you've created a house that's not standing, it's standing. But a house has to be right.

To put the triangle and the square on top of each other, you need a second sound track.

To do this, simply repeat step 1.

I've reduced the frequency to 392, which is the same as tone g1.

If you play the tracks individually, the second track sounds different. Together, it sounds more like a hum.

The first thing you do is edit the upper track, which is going to be the roof. The amplitude is still shifting symmetrically around the zero point, which you don't want. So mark that track and click on Effect. There, you'll find DC offset...

Take settings from the image.

This divides the upper track into an upper light blue and lower dark blue stripe.

The dark blue is the sound that will be played later.

You can already edit this track with the Envelope Tool, but it turns the bottom half into a triangle on top, which we don't want. You have to change the track so that the dark blue area is at the top. To do this, you mark the top track, then go to Effect and select Invert.

Now you can use the Envelope Tool to shape the triangle for the roof. You can zoom in on the tracks to make it easier.

To make the four-side figure for the house, you now work the bottom lane. The important thing is that it is not inverted. Instead, you simply shape the quadrangle directly below the triangle.

Now you have the roof in the top lane, the house downstairs and a lot of space in between that doesn't belong there. But you want the roof to be right on top of the house.

To do this, mark both tracks. Then go to  Tracks and than to Mix and render.

The two Tracks merge into one and the house is finished.

Theoretically, it is possible to form any other shape.The important thing is that there are no gaps or concaves.

The bird is too complex because it's not possible to model it on two tracks.It needs to be edited somewhat.You can use almost any image editing program.

The bird is rotated slightly and the areas that are not vertical are filled in or erased.Only then is it possible to represent the bird as audio waves.

You can see in the video how I did it. It's not perfect, it's just a quick example.