Sounder Studio

Advanced Image-Based Audio Editor & Synthesizer

Created by Joel Lagace

Sounder Studio is a creative spectral manipulation tool that bridges the gap between visual art and sound design. By converting audio into visual spectrograms (and vice versa), it allows you to paint with sound, apply image filters to audio frequencies, and manipulate sonic textures using familiar image-editing tools.

Features

Visual Sound Editing

• Familiar Tools: Paint, erase, draw lines, and flood-fill directly onto the audio spectrum.
• Image FX: Apply brightness, contrast, gamma correction, and color inversions to sculpt frequencies.
• Geometric Transforms: Flip audio backward in time, invert frequencies, or apply selective bandpass/bandstop filters.

Bi-Directional Conversion

• WAV to Image: Load any standard .wav file and translate it into a high-resolution grayscale spectrogram.
• Image to WAV: Regenerate playable, exportable audio from any image using the Griffin-Lim algorithm.

Advanced Synthesis & FX

• Granular Synthesis: Turn visual selections into playable sound grains, scatter grains across the canvas, or generate dense grain clouds.
• Spectral Freeze & Smear: Freeze a specific column of time and smear it across your track.
• Chaos & Glitch: Inject colored noise (White, Pink, Blue), randomly scatter frequency blocks, and slice/glitch the audio timeline.
• Time Warping: Place custom warp markers to dynamically stretch and compress specific segments of audio.
• State Morphing: Save visual states and smoothly morph between different spectral snapshots.

Optical Spectroscope Simulator

• Includes a built-in scientific spectroscope simulator.
• Treats the grayscale spectrogram as a light source (like burning gas or a star).
• Simulates passing light through a diffraction grating, complete with elemental emission/absorption line detection (Hydrogen, Helium, Sodium, etc.).

Installation

Prerequisites

Make sure you have Python 3.8 or higher installed on your system.

Note on Audio Playback: Live audio playback relies on the sounddevice library, which requires PortAudio to be installed on your system.

• Windows: PortAudio is usually included with the sounddevice pip wheel.
• macOS: brew install portaudio
• Linux (Debian/Ubuntu): sudo apt-get install libportaudio2

Setup

1. Clone the repository:

git clone [https://github.com/yourusername/sounder-studio.git](https://github.com/yourusername/sounder-studio.git)
cd sounder-studio

2. Install the required Python dependencies:

pip install numpy scipy librosa soundfile Pillow sounddevice

3. Run the application:

python sounder_studio.py

Basic Usage

1. Load a File: Click WAV to Image to load an existing audio file, or click Load to load any image file (PNG/JPG) to convert into sound.
2. Edit: Use the Tools panel on the left to paint or erase parts of the spectrum.
3. Apply Effects: Use the tabs on the right to apply Granular, Creative, or Morphing effects.
4. Regenerate: Click the Apply & Regen button in the top menu to permanently apply your visual changes and synthesize the new audio.
5. Listen: Press the Play button to hear your creation, adjusting the speed slider as needed.
6. Export: Click Image to WAV to save your synthesized audio back to a standard WAV file.

Built With

• Tkinter - GUI Framework
• Librosa - Audio and music processing
• Pillow (PIL) - Image processing
• Sounddevice - Live audio playback
• NumPy & SciPy - Array and signal mathematics

If you make something cool with Sounder Studio, feel free to share it!