audacious corruptions

corrupting image files using audio editing

Ever since I discovered you could import raw data into the audio editing program Audacity, I wondered if you could run a file through audio effects and re-export it as a viewable image file. After some googling, I landed on this process:

  1. convert your image to .tif
  2. open Audacity and go to file -> import -> raw data
  3. select the image and set encoding to “U-Law” and byte order to little-endian
  4. apply effects to the audio newly created track (do not change the beginning/end of the audio or change the overall length because the file will be unopenable)
  5. go to export -> export audio
  6. save as type “other uncompressed files”
  7. set header to “RAW (header-less)” and encoding to “U-Law”
  8. save as a new, artistically corrupted .tif file
From left to right: the original image, the same image with an echo effect, the image pitch shifted up by a very tiny amount, and the image with an EQ applied.
Left: the image with a wah-wah effect. Right: the image with the middle section reversed. Interestingly, reversing the audio inverts the colors while also flipping the image.

After messing around with various effects on this test image, I tried corrupting some of my own photos.

This photo looked fine in Microsoft Photos, but it turned almost completely red when I added it to the website, so I took a screenshot to duplicate it. Sometimes the corruption process can cause weird inexplicable things like that to happen.
Changing the parameters of the echo effect can change the craziness of the image.
Sometimes, you can get different output images even with the exact settings. Some images also look different depending on what photo viewer you're using. I have no idea why these phenomena occur.