With the Degraded Image Project, we wanted to showcase our passions and how they lead us to interpret images differently. We wanted to demonstrate the chain of manipulation that occurs, hoping to show that you’ll never know how truly different an image is from the original. To start, Walker took an image of his bike after he rode to the top of Howard’s Knob. Behind the bike, you can see a nice view of App State’s campus. With the image file, Walker converted the image into sound. Img-encoders create bit-crushed musical notes based on the colors of each pixel in a photo. Size, spacing, and color contrast play a role in how loud and pronounced the sound ends up being. The sound produced interestingly sounded like a bicycle going down the road. 

       Walker then took the sound and uploaded it into FL Studio to create a sonic spectrogram. Surprisingly, the sound created an identical image! Typically, spectrograms split the lows, mids, and highs of a sound file to create waves. The resulting image is generally akin to mountain peaks. Little did he know that the clicks and whistles would reconstruct the image in its entirety! Walker then tried various effects, which led him to discover that an inverted image is just a backward audio file. He also discovered that sound speed directly correlates with image length and width. With that, Walker plugged the sound into a guitar amp and used settings for punk rock. He cranked up the distortion and added a bright and wild shift of colors to the spectrogram by sporadically turning the amp on and off. This experiment made us completely rethink our views on sight and sound, and we had no idea they were so connected.

       After all of this, it was Addison’s turn to interpret and manipulate the image. Upon receiving the first image, her thought was to figure out how to manipulate the image based on her interpretation of Walker’s work. After looking through Walker’s steps, she felt that the image had undergone quite a journey, and she decided to take the image with her throughout the day. Addison printed the image out and then rubbed and scratched it on whatever surface she could find. Addison then scanned that image into Photoshop and inverted the colors to bring out the scratch marks more. 

       Addison’s personal goal with her half of the project was to showcase the chain of how an image is interpreted and manipulated. To do this, she then took the new image and shared it with friends and family to ask them what the first word that came to mind when looking at that photo was. Addison even asked ChatGPT for its opinion on the piece. After receiving all their answers, Addison printed out the photo again and drew what everyone had said. She then scanned the photo into Photoshop once more and inverted and posterized the photo to bring out the shapes and colors. Finally, Addison overlaid the original image on top of the new image and used the subtract blending mode to bring out aspects of both images. 

       Ultimately, our image was a perfect example of how sight and sound are interconnected. From a technical standpoint to a psychological one, we saw how people manipulate and interpret images differently. This project was also a great example of how to deconstruct an image by going through processes you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. This project allowed us to create an image that was more meaningful and visually stunning than the original image. We feel as though the final product reflects adventure, punk energy, and the collaboration of friends and family.