Well, seeing sounds as images really is my big idea because basically when you look at a spectrogram (a sound's image) you really see what the sound is made of, you see what you hear, so my big starting idea was since you can see all you hear, if you can edit what you see visually and turn that back into sound then you open a whole world of possibilities.
Hehe, as for pictures, try mostly dark ones, or make them dark, bright pictures all sound the same
In the image time is "mapped" horizontally. Basically if you wanted to conserve a time dimension, then you'd have to make it a 1D animation, i.e. a 1 pixel wide line animated in time, which of course wouldn't be practical. Also, sampling rate isn't very relevant here, because what matters is the intensity of things, i.e. we descriminate the pitch of things (which is represented vertically here) from their intensity, which is represented by brightness. I chose here the arbitrary value of 100 pixels (horizontally) per second, meaning a 10 second sound will produce an image 1,000 pixels wide, and 571 pixels high (9.5 octaves * 60 pixels per octave).
Oh yeah, absolutely any image editing program works with that, you can even try editing (or creating) sounds in MS Paint if you like (I once made a drum loop in MS Paint with the spray tool, but it didn't sound too great).
If you want you can even print out the image, paint over it with a brush and some actually paint, scan the result and listen to what it does. Although you'd need a pretty good printer and scanner to pull it off correctly
hehe.
