Sounds of the Americans: Converting Iconic Images Into Sound and Back Again

Over the last month we’ve featured two re-interpretations of Robert Frank’s classic photo book “The Americans” — one controversial and minimalistic, another analytical. And now we bring you a third, very different, auditory take on Frank’s classic work.

Photographer Andrew Emond‘s Sounds of the Americans is a re-interpretation of The Americans using sound. By using a specialized software to convert all 83 images into audio, and then using a spectrograph to take that audio and re-create the original image, Emond’s work sheds an entirely different light on iconic pictures we’ve all become very familiar with.

Like The Histograms project, Emond’s take on The Americans applies a modern technological spin to a perennial classic. Unlike The Histograms, however, some of the results of Emond’s experiment are quite wall-worthy.

Head over to the project’s website to see all 83 of the spectrographs or get more info on the project and the photographer behind it.