Reconstructing Radiohead

It's been a while since I updated my webpage and a lot has happened since. I moved to live in The Hague and study in The Institute of Sonology. I also finished writing my PhD thesis and am so glad to be able to finally put this segment in my life behind me (for the time being...).

This year was filled with creative projects, including new music that I composed, the building of a new intrument that provides haptic feedback to the player (to be covered in the near future), and various participations in festivals and intimate performances in local venues in The Hague and Tel Aviv. But there's one thing that I was involved in a while ago and kind of slipped through the cracks...

Back in the Computational Biology lab I was doing research in, a friend of mine and I started messing around with the idea of "music reconstruction". Together we wrote a python code that takes a sound file, breaks it into small chunks of about 100 ms each, transforms each part to the frequency domain using Fast Fourier Transform, and calculates the distance between every pair of chunks. It then finds the shortest path that transverses all of the chunks and puts them back together. It is kind of like a puzzle that you assemble while putting pieces with similar colors next to each other.

I then went a bit further and implemented the same idea for images and applied it to one of my favorite songs, Radiohead's The National Anthem and to the album cover of KID A. Below you can find the result.

Feel free to write me with questions or if you want access to the code.

Cheers!

omer