✏️ Paint
▦ Grid & scale
🖼️ Picture
Stretched onto the grid — bright areas play loud, and colour becomes stereo (red → left ear, green → right). Rotate or flip changes what the picture sounds like. You can also just drag & drop a picture anywhere.
🖼️ How Image Synth works
This is a tiny version of a classic trick: treating a picture as sound. The grid is read like sheet music from left to right.
The three rules
- Left → right = time. The playhead sweeps across; the left edge plays first.
- Up = higher pitch. Each row is a note. The top row is the highest, the bottom the lowest.
- Brighter = louder. A dim cell whispers; a bright cell sings.
Every lit-up row plays its note at the same time, so a tall bright column is a chord and a diagonal line is a slide from low to high.
Left and right ears (colour = stereo)
Each cell has a left and a right side. The Ear buttons pick which one you paint: 🔴 Left, 🟢 Right, or ⚪ Both. When you load a picture, its red becomes the left ear and its green the right — so a colourful photo spreads across your headphones.
Design the sound
The Oscillator · Filter · Filter Env · Envelope · LFO panels are the same sound designer as the Synth Lab — they shape the tone of every note the picture plays. Stack up to three oscillators (each with its own waveform, pitch and filter — use the Editing tabs to pick which one you're changing), colour them with Noise, and add wobble with the LFO. Here the drawing is the volume-over-time, so Attack and Release soften how notes start and end, and Sustain sets the overall level.
The Filter Env row is a second envelope that sweeps each filter's cutoff as a note plays — turn a filter on, dial the Cutoff down and Resonance up, then raise the Amount and every painted note brightens then darkens on its own (that classic “wow” sweep). Amount 0 leaves the tone steady.
Things to try
- Draw a diagonal line — hear a rising or falling slide.
- Scatter a few dots — a little melody of beeps.
- Load a picture of a logo or big letters and listen to its shape.
- Switch the Scale to Pentatonic so anything you paint sounds musical.
All sound is made live in your browser with the Web Audio API — nothing is uploaded anywhere.
📖 Want the science behind it? Read the Sound Manual — waveforms, harmonics, envelopes, filters and a little music theory, with diagrams and live examples.