I was thinking that Audacity, or maybe an optional Nyquist plugin, would let you import raw data that would output the following ideas:
would be a drumstick, 1 would be a drum kick, and you manually set the tempo.
would be one note of any selected instrument, 1 would be another note, and you manually select the notes and frequencies.
would be nothing, 1 would be a sample of any given audio.
The only downside that I can really think of is that depending how big the binary is, this could take a long time, depending on how powerful your computer’s processor (and ram?), but if you have a powerful computer, this shouldn’t be a problem.
There is a program called KCS, short for Kansas City Standard, which takes the binary code of any binary file, and gives two different signals for the 1’s and 0’s…1200Hz for 0, 2400Hz for 1, and puts the audio on a cassette tape. I was thinking of doing a similar thing in Audacity similar to KCS where instead of rapid fast saw waves (or sine waves), it would consist of drum 0 and drum 1, where drum 1 will have a slightly higher percussion than drum 0. Either that or what I provided as a sample, which by the way represents two 8-bit bytes of data that represents the lowercase letters “dy”.
which by the way represents two 8-bit bytes of data that represents the lowercase letters “dy”.
If you know that, maybe you are a programmer? And, I assume you know that binary sequence doesn’t always represent “dy”. It only represents dy in an ASCII file. Otherwise, it could be almost anything.
If you’re a programmer, maybe you can write a program to turn a binary sequence into a MIDI sequence? That’s an easy way to get nice drum sounds (or other musical sounds). And the resulting file (if you create a file) would be much smaller than an audio file, but still larger than your original file.
Realistically, any “random” non-audio file is going to generate a random-sounding sequence. (I wouldn’t want to listen too long…)
The only downside that I can really think of is that depending how big the binary is, this could take a long time, depending on how powerful your computer’s processor (and ram?), but if you have a powerful computer, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Yes, you’re starting out with one bit per beat (a few beats per second) and converting to thousands of bytes per second. You don’t need a powerful computer to make sounds in real time but if you’re making regular audio files they could be huge and they might play for a long-long-time.
"if you know that, maybe you are a programmer? And, I assume you know that binary sequence doesn’t always represent “dy”. It only represents dy in an ASCII file. Otherwise, it could be almost anything. "
I used a binary to ASCII translator. And no, I’m not really a programmer.
"If you’re a programmer, maybe you can write a program to turn a binary sequence into a MIDI sequence? That’s an easy way to get nice drum sounds (or other musical sounds). And the resulting file (if you create a file) would be much smaller than an audio file, but still larger than your original file. "
You have a good point about smaller files. But still, I used a Binary to ASCII translator
You could do this with Nyquist (Nyquist - Audacity Manual).
I’m not going to do it for you, because it would be a lot of work and I think the end result is not worth the effort (for me), but I’m willing to help you if you want to put in the time and effort to learn enough Nyquist programming to make this plug-in.
You would have to restrict the file size, or how much of the file was read, otherwise your computer will run out of disk space. (Rough calculation: If each beat is 1/4 second duration, a 1MB file will produce an audio track that is (0.25 x 8 x 1000000) / 3600 = 555 hours 33 minutes 20 seconds.)
Considering that an arbitrary input file is basically a source of random 0’s and 1’s, why not just generate random 0’s and 1’s? Doing so would greatly simplify the plug-in.
