MS Paint Binary converted to audio sounds makes trippy techno music

[proboardslol]

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xZgCVG_Bzk[/media]

[chenhonkster]

there used to be a thread for this in creationism corner, i found some stuff that was great

[Darkwater]

Best drawing program AND best music track? Where do I buy this?

[Rixxz2]

I just tried it with the W7 version of paint, it's true

Edit: Tried with some other programs, as well. Most of them cause that weird repeating pattern that can be heard at for example 0:29 to appear in certain places, wonder what's causing it

[proboardslol]

[QUOTE=Rixxz2;46338779]I just tried it with the W7 version of paint, it's true

Edit: Tried with some other programs, as well. Most of them cause that weird repeating pattern that can be heard at for example 0:29 to appear in certain places, wonder what's causing it[/QUOTE]

if od (octal dump) a program (in this instance, I'll use xfce4-terminal) by typing:

od xfce4-terminal > $HOME/odDumpChar

we get the following data:

[url]http://pastebin.com/SSrzvRLA[/url]

The first column is just the location of the data being displayed.

The first thing you'll notice is a lot of zeroes. The next thing you might notice is that the rows in the 4th column alternate between zeros and 22. a lot of this data makes no sense at all until we put it into a human readable format by typing:

od xfce4-terminal -c > $HOME/odDumpChar

This time we've added the -c (for character) option.

and we get this:

[url]http://pastebin.com/9wmxmHHD[/url]

I've cut off a lot of the first part since it all looks the same, but what you'll notice is that the code is no longer seemingly random numbers, but is in fact the numerical version of actual, human-readable code! Some of this code is what actually appears in the code for the program (other code is what has been constructed by the compiler).

If you scroll down to like 2350 (on the lefthand side), you'll see that in the sixth column, it has started to list some punctuation marks and eventually the alphabet. it's now listing part of the ascii table. if you go up to 2497, you'll see "\0" in the 6th column. this is the "end of line" character which is actually represented by 0 on the ascii table. Thus, this part of the program is starting to list all 255 elements of the ascii table.

This may not mean anything to most people (nor does it mean much to me), but the realm of machine code is actually not as nebulous as most people think. I know nothing about compiler theory, but basically what you're listening to is the machine equivalent of symbolic code being repeated throughout the program.

People can use od to look for the binary of commonly used algorithms to try to decipher certain elements about a program.

edit: to make a correction, \0 is not the "end of line character", it's the "null character", which tells the computer when the end of a string is. the difference is that the end of line character, \n, will actually start a new line, whereas the null character, \0, will simply tell the computer when to stop reading a character array for more data.