Ok so!

Databending is "in essence, the artistic misuse of digital information," basically the digital worlds equivalent of circuit bending. It can be taking a file (usually an image) and modifying it in a way it wasn't meant to be. There are virtually infinite ways of doing this, i.e. opening an image in a text editor, audio editing program, hex editor, etc.

Today, I'm going to show you two different ways of doing this, one simple, one less simple.

Method 1: Plain Text editor (Notepad, Notepad++, etc.)

1) Pick your image. Works better with JPG, for some reason. I'm going to use a picture of this ridiculously attractive female with glasses and a batman shirt today.
2) Open your image in your text editor or choice.
3) Now this is where the fun starts :p Do not edit the first few lines of the image, as that's the header. Here, you can do as much, or as little as you want. Put in characters, take out characters, move around characters, etc.
4) Save the image. If it doesn't open right, you screwed up the header. Start over, and scroll down more than you did in the previous step, and try again.
5) The end! here's my result.

Method 2: Audacity
(I use the latest beta, so the menus are different. If don't have it, get the beta, if you already have it, it's all there, just different places)

1) Same as before, pick your image. This time, convert it to a bitmap (.bmp) image. I'm using the same image as before
2) Open up Audacity. File » Import » Raw Data, select your image.
3)Set encoding to U-Law, and Byte Order to Big Endian, leave everything else as is, and Import it.
4) The fun part! This time, you can add various effects to the image. Reverse, echo, phaser, flanger, EQ, etc. And again, watch out for the header. The header is easier to watch out for here, because you can usually see the difference in the wave form.
5) When you're done, click File » Export. In the Save as Type box, select Other uncompressed files. Click Options, make sure Header is set to RAW (Headerless) and encoding is set to whatever you set it to when opening (following this, U-Law), Click OK, and save it.
6) If necessary, change the extension back to .bmp. Again, if it doesn't open, you probably overwrote the header.
7) The end! A few examples of mine: Reversed a small part, Invert, and Phaser.

As you can see, the two different methods have very different outcomes. And there's nothing to day you couldn't do both. :p

And of course, once you get the hang of this, try experimenting. These are just simple guide lines, not the only way to do it. Try importing with different encodings, etc. Experimentation is key for creative databending. :D

Have fun and experiment. :D

Ooh sweet tut man! Thanks

(02/08/2010 04:48 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  JPEG?  I thought these things would work best with uncompressed sources (eg BMP)?  Some might have CRC checks to detect this type of corruption, or you could otherwise damage the decompression algo.

For BMP, I think the first ~56 bytes are typically the header, for 24-bit images.  So just mess up everything after that.  Actually, I wonder, if you import it into your sound editor as mono 24-bit raw PCM (sample rate doesn't matter), it will treat pixels as sound samples.

Thanks for the post!

I was saying JPEG for just text-editing, BMP is all I got working with Audacity. And I've actually only tried JPEG and PNG with Notepad++, and PNG didn't work too well.

And I just imported a BMP into Audacity as Signed 24-big PCM, exported it as the same, and it wasn't too happy lol.

And I've made some minor edits to the main post. :D

yea ill read this thread decently when i get home and give it a go.

who is this female

i need more pics



^ 1st try

xithy has already seen

another one

Wow, neato.
Dunno if it really qualifies as art, though; on the other hand, I have the artistic sense of a wet sock, so what would I know?