What do you mean by noises? Metasynth and Coagula (a free program that does this on winXP) both make a lot of interesting sounds, of which "noise" would only by one potential.

If you really wanted to avoid noise, however, it would be even more trivial, however, to produce MIDI output (or some melodic type of output), than to synthesize based on the material. For instance, the first idea I imagine is that one could take the RGB values from each vertical column, and turn them into some kind of three part counterpoint. You just need some simple mappings to go from (0-256) to whatever scale or pitch sets you want to use. If I were doing it, I might take the resulting pitch set, and use it to generate a probability weighting for the chance that a given pitch would occur, with each column representing an arbitrary amount of compositional time. I don't think this would sound at all like noise.

You could also map the same set of values to synth paremeters, making sure the entire range of settings produce "non-noisy" timbres... So the timbre and melodic content would be produced simultaneously from the same data set.

This is really more about "data mapping / data bending" and broader than the question of "playing a bitmap." Which is a topic I would really enjoy getting more input in - I've never found any good tutorials on how to approach data mapping and parameterization in order to get good, musical results, even though this would seem to be absolutely crucial to good instrument design. At least, googling hasn't helped me... Maybe (based on my ideas above) I already know enough, and I just haven't tried enough to implement things and learn by experience though...

~David

On 2/2/07, Patco <mega...@yahoo.fr> wrote: