Hi Tofu, & all hail to our new "supreme being" (aka "moderator") :-)

Back in the olden days when I used Windows, I did some databending with
Goldwave, Coagula & GoMinimal.

I opened some specially created image files in Goldwave & saved them as
wave files, them fed them into GoMinimal, which is/was a wave to midi
converter. http://www.artsong.org/cnf/Warehouse/24143422_microscape.mp3
is one example of such activities. I did similar things with other
pieces, but converting image files using Coagula before submitting them
to the tender mercies of GoMinimal.

Nowadays I use Linux & I am discovering some interesting software for
databending. Audacity will open any type of file, but seems a little
inflexible in how you can stretch the raw data in terms of degrading the
sound quality in exchange for greater duration.

XWave, on the other hand, is a dirty little whore that will open any
file & translate lower sound quality into a longer sound. The only
downside is that it's a bit buggy still. I would say that I have had my
most promising results so far with XWave.

Early exploration of text-bending on Linux has been very encouraging.
Some of you may know that Linux has many different text editors, each
with its own band of zealous devotees. There are some "oldskool" apps
like Vi, which is truly from the dark side, a text editor that runs in a
terminal window & is entirely keystroke operated. I like Vi - it is very
efficient once you get the hang of it. My current favourite, however, is
AbiWord; which is a thoroughly modern word processor. AbiWord is great
for just processing the text, while I have used the brutality of Vi to
open awkward or corrupted text based files. I also quite like the idea
of using a systematic string of key strokes in Vi to bend the text, but
I'll have to try it & see what happens.

When fatherhood permits (& when I am not composing with pencil & paper),
I am inching towards some new databending tracks.

Happy New Year to all,

Gavin.


On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 13:36:04 -0500
tofu <tofu@...> wrote:

>
> >Databenders has a new owner, so it's all good. If you want to get in
> >touch with tofu (aka Mike), email databenders-owner@yahoogroups.com.
>
> *waves*
>
> Welcome -- some of our 300+ subscribers are probably surprised to
> learn they're still on the list ;)
>
> Guessing that we're all at different levels in our databending
> efforts, let me throw out a question to you -- what are some of
> _your_ basic tools for databending? just looking an idea of what's
> out there: software (and platform) and/or hardware...
>
> For example, the old standby of opening pictures or text files with a
> audio editor (in my case, CoolEditPro) will still get interesting
> results. Like this one called "Alphabet 4" which came from opening a
> text file with repeating strings of a-z, A-Z, 0-9...
>
> http://www.synthcleveland.com/imaginary/alphabet4.mp3
>
> this sound in turn, was used in the microsound mcdonna project (2001)
>
> http://microsound.org/mcdonna/audio/mcdonna_tofu_azano.mp3
>
> or streaming from http://microsound.org/mcdonna/
>
> So, what do you use to bend your data?
>
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> Yahoo! Groups Links
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