Every picture is already a signal.

A photo is just a grid of numbers. Read one horizontal line of it from left to right and you have a waveform, so you can listen to it. Scanline turns any image into sound three different ways, shows you exactly which pixels you're hearing, and exports the result as audio you can use elsewhere.

Pick one and press play — they all sound different

📷 Use your own image or drop one anywhere on the page

The three ways it listens

🌊 Wavetable

One pixel row becomes one cycle of a waveform, looped at audio rate. Bright and dark pixels are peaks and troughs.

For sound designers: export to Serum or Vital

🎹 Harmonic

Brightness and edge density are mapped onto notes of a musical scale, so the image plays as a chord progression.

For ambient music and generative scores

👁 vOICe scan

The classic sensory-substitution mapping: sweeps left to right, height becomes pitch, brightness becomes loudness.

How sensory substitution works

Drag on the image to scrub rows · Space play/stop · ↑↓ step rows · R random sound · H hide the photo · ? reopen this screen Everything runs locally in your browser. Your images are never uploaded anywhere.

Scanline

image → sound

Open image

No image loaded

ready

Mode

One pixel row is read as a single waveform cycle and looped at audio rate. Dark and bright pixels become the troughs and peaks you hear.

Presets

Sound

Pitch 110 Hz Cycle length 0.25 s Brightness → tone 0.70 Edges → tone 1.70 Volume 0.22

Row selection

Row 110 Motion

Display

Photo behind waves 28% Wave height 11.0 Scanlines 220

Viewport & analysis

Smoothing 2 Horizontal scale 100% Vertical scale 100%

Shaping

Filters & space

Image texture 55% Space 32% High pass 30 Hz Low pass 9000 Hz Drive 0.0

Export

Row → WAV renders the current sound to a file. Wavetable writes a 256-frame by 2048-sample table sweeping top to bottom. Drop it into Serum, Vital, or Ableton's Wavetable to play the whole image as one instrument. Copy link saves every knob into the URL, so you can send a patch to a friend. The image itself stays on your machine.