CheepMap (2009)

CheepMap is a sound-generating program written in ChucK and Java. I wrote it as a final project for a computer music course at CCRMA, Stanford's experimental sound lab. It is modeled after the BeepMap plugin that ships with FL Studio: it accepts an image file and uses the colors in the image to create sound. In some ways it's sort of like a reverse spectrogram.

More detailed description from the project page:

The image is divided into a stack of horizontal bands (say, 16 or 32 of them). Each band corresponds to two oscillators: left channel and right channel. These oscillators have a fixed frequency, such that bands near the bottom of the image have low pitch and bands near the top have higher pitch.

When a column of pixels reaches ChucK, it is divided between the bands. Each pixel contains a red, green, and blue value. The red value controls the gain of the left oscillator, and the green controls the gain of the right. The more intense the color, the louder that frequency band.

Optionally, the blue value causes the oscillator to change its frequency within the band that it is assigned. An intense blue value means the oscillator will go to the top of its band; zero means the oscillator will almost go to the band below it.

There are instructions to download this and play with it on the CCRMA project page.