Hey guys, I'm a digital media artist working on a piece and I was hoping for a little bit of help. To give you a quick background on my knowledge level, I'm new to C++ but I know Actionscript 2.0 fairly extensively from Flash and enough PHP to get by. The system I'm developing on is a Mac running OS X.4 and I've gotten pretty good at compiling little Linux apps here and there for projects I've worked out and I've compiled a couple of my own rudimentary C++ apps. So here's what I'm hoping to do:
I'd like to write a small command line app that will first take a grayscale image and read every pixel as a level of black (0-100 or 0-255) and place that in an array. Then the app would take a wav file (an existing song), place a start tone at the beginning of the song and from there on out adjust the overall volume (on a scale of 0-100 or 0-255) in 1 sec chunks to match up with the array from the image. The idea is to then write a companion app that could listen to a wav file, wait for that beginning tone, and then feed the sound levels back in as pixels to recreate an image (I realize the image size parameters would need to be predetermined). The application here is to etch the resulting sounds onto vinyl records and allow people to record them onto their computers and see an image. Tagging a beginning tone onto the song helps with the fact that when people record the song off of the vinyl they'll all start recording at arbitrary points at the beginning.
I know it's impractical but thats the fun of art! Anyway, I could probably cobble most of this together if I knew what image and sound libraries to look at and what methods to use. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for the patience with a fish out of water.
