
The sound of mspaint.exe when interpreted as PCM audio data - mambodog
http://soundcloud.com/r2bl3nd/windows-7-x64-ms-paint-exe
======
CWuestefeld
Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my roommate was working on a
commercial app that was a music composition and sequencing tool. One night I
heard some unusual music coming from his room, and a few moments later he ran
out all excited. It turns out that he'd had a bug in his code, and the music
we'd been hearing was the program playing itself: interpreting its own code as
music data.

What was surprising, though, was how coherent it actually sounded as music.
There was, for example, a perceptible beat. We always wondered whether this
was due to the structure of the executable code, or because of the way the
program interpreted its data. Unfortunately he was never able to reproduce the
bug in quite the same way.

[1] "RealTime" for the Atari ST, see <http://tamw.atari-
users.net/realtime.htm>

~~~
daeken
I had a really, really odd experience when I was very young -- probably no
older than 6 or so. I was on a 386 running MS DOS 5 and at the time, I was
hooked on a game called "Pilgrim's Quest". I was also in the habit of breaking
edit.com out on everything I could get my fingers on, and binaries were no
exception. I had no idea what I was doing (otherwise I would've been using
debug.com), but I would delete things, type random characters, etc. One day, I
took edit.com to the binary for Pilgrim's Quest, and proceeded to mess with
it, rendering it useless. Except, it wasn't useless. When I ran it, the
display was messed up, but pressing keys caused notes to play. To this day, I
can't figure out why this would've happened -- I know of no functionality in
the game that played single notes (although, to be fair, I don't remember if
it played a note and then stopped or continued playing it indefinitely -- this
was a long time ago), and I can't see how one could stumble upon that.

I really wish I knew what the hell I did, as that was the first time I ever
made the computer do something it wasn't intended to do, even if it was not my
intention.

------
nitrogen
I used to listen to RAM dumps from an HDTV tuner card I was reverse
engineering to try to find its audio buffers. Naturally the image buffers
always sounded interesting. I eventually wrote a rudimentary ALSA driver for
it.

You can get sounds that sound like an alien machine by taking some super-noisy
image or executable data and slowing it down several times using a high-
quality resampling algorithm.

~~~
eps
> I used to listen to RAM dumps from an HDTV tuner card

This is pure gold.

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JonnieCache
This is bizarre. It sounds ridiculously close to actual records that I own and
have played out.

For example:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InUiVFLTGdo>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjBOqPDXEog>

Fun fact: the second one was entirely made on a gameboy.

Expect mspaint.exe to have been remixed and to have found its way onto
london's pirate airwaves by the end of the week.

------
spiralganglion
I'm reminded of one of my favourite pieces of "music", the Symphony For Dot
Matrix Printers. Basically, a couple Canadians acquired a crop of old
printers, wired them up to some equally old computers, and figured out how to
feed them all sorts of interesting printing instructions. Listening very
carefully to the resulting sounds, they figured out how _exactly_ to place
microphones to capture all the fascinating sonic nuances, organizing the
printers and their noises into various instrumental roles. They composed a
surprisingly musical work for the printers to play, as though they were an
orchestra, which was performed live and recorded. The recording is rather
difficult to track down, but is quite a treat for enthusiasts of real
"computer music".

They sound like printers. But they sound like printers, re-imagined by people
who hear music in everything.

For anyone interested, here is their very, very old website:
<http://www.theuser.org/dotmatrix/en/intro.html>

There was a symphony #2, but the first is the better of the two in my opinion.

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daeken
This reminded me of an interesting bit of research by Inigo Quilez into using
sounds from gm.dls (the Windows General MIDI sample et) to generate textures:
<http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/gmdlsgfx/gmdlsgfx.htm>

Pretty interesting what you can get out of it.

------
S_A_P
I actually stumbled across this while experimenting with libsndfile(www.mega-
nerd.com) I built a .NET wrapper around it for converting telephony .vox files
to a more user friendly format. In the process of beta testing I found you can
feed any bits you want to it and it will spit out a "wav" or other of its
supported formats to be played by any media player. I guess I will have to
revisit that project for musical inspiration...

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rbanffy
I remember being able to distinguish bitmaps in Apple II games saved to tape
(floppy disk drives were too expensive for me at that time). This brings me
back memories.

There was also a radio program that transmitted audio on one channel and
computer programs on the other one, broadcast from the local university radio
on, IIRC, Saturday afternoons. Those programs were for MSXs, so I never loaded
them.

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albertzeyer
It sounds like there is a lot of repetition in the EXE file.

~~~
pmjordan
I was surprised by that. I wonder what portions are actual machine code, and
what parts are embedded data blobs ("resources" in Windows terminology). I
also can't explain the crescendo at the start.

~~~
mambodog
I'm pretty sure that is a fade-in added by the uploader.

------
brianmckenzie
Another interesting thing to do is play back image data as audio. I used to
use this for wild sound effects in tracks I was making about 15 years ago.
Never did get to the point where I could play around in photoshop to
deliberately create sounds, but I suppose one could if you made a study of it.

------
smcl
Anyone care to suggest the reason behind the four notes that are repeated over
and over (occasionally with slightly different filters)?

~~~
SwellJoe
I assumed they were UI elements. I haven't actually seen MS Paint in ten or
more years, but I'm guessing it has many widgets that are square buttons with
something inside, so the image data would appear as repeating patterns of
identical length and have at least somewhat similar content (because
everything is in a bordered box, and there's probably an "up" and "depressed"
version of each, leading to nearly identical sounds being side-by-side in the
data).

That's just a guess though. One would probably need to disassemble it and roam
around a bit to be sure.

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icarus_drowning
A whole new genre of music concrete[1] has just been born.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concr%C3%A8te>

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kalleboo
Now where's the music video where this is synced to the same data interpreted
as 100x100px frames of RGB image data?

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rbxbx
Used to do this "back in the day" (circa 2k2) for getting nice audio glitches
back when I was producing significantly noisier music.

<http://sickmode.org/scrap/mercykilling.mp3>

perhaps it will inspire a new generation of noisemakers ;)

~~~
EgeBamyasi
Woho, this is great!

Do you got any more of this stuff lying around? Dont have the time to go
trough all the stuff in scrap.

~~~
rbxbx
Thanks for the feedback!

The only other similar-ish thing I have lying around from that era would be
<http://sickmode.org/scrap/organ_grinder.mp3>

I've mellowed out quite a bit since then ;)

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tintin
Funny. I used to do this all the time in Fasttracker2. Most of the time you
can use noise like this as high-hat. But sometimes you discover 'gem' that
just sound great without tweaking.

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hackermom
The "tune" on soundcloud.com is mspaint.exe as 8bit signed PCM, but modified -
try importing it in f.e. Audacity and you will notice that quite some editing
(fade ins/outs, time stretching etc.) has been applied to the soundcloud.com
version.

~~~
mambodog
The creator states:

 _This works in Audacity, and probably any other audio program that can import
raw PCM data. I imported it﻿ as 22050hz 8-bit stereo audio in Adobe Audition,
but it seemed to sound mostly the same in Audacity._ _All I did to the audio
was master it slightly to make it sound less harsh to the ears, as well as
remove a long section of noise._

Did you import it with a 22050hz sample rate?

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yuhong
I remember <http://dumpanalysis.org> does something like this.

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jodrellblank
It sounds interesting, but what amazed me most is soundcloud working on
iPhone.

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olalonde
Apparently, Microsoft is better at music than software :D

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jleyank
If you play it backwards, it says Paul is dead...

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user24
Microsoft Underground Chiptune Resistance!

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vanni
Sooo geeky :)

