Transcoding

"Transcoding" is a label for the intuition that information can be translated from one form to another.

Most recently I've drafted an outline for classifying transcoding systems, A Transcoding Framework, that includes an appendix surveying a number of transcoding projects (for updates on projects as I come across them, see the transcoding blog).

I started working with transcoding in the form of sonification, which I called "resounding" before I found out about recent research in the field. I made some distinctions between approaches to sonification (in a paper titled "How to Hear Anything") and explored the possibility of sonifying a large glass sculpture, "Emerald Laminata". For example, six slices were taken from the sculpture; for one piece the depth of the slice over its width was mapped to the pitch of a section of a string ensemble over time, producing an ambient piece with classical instrumentation and a surprising amount of movement (hear an excerpt). For another piece, the slices were mapped to samples and quantized over time, producing strange rhythms and textures (hear an excerpt).

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Visualization is one type of transcoding — above, an audio signal is interpreted as video.