What would your Facebook photograph sound like?

Los Angeles-based experimental musician Daniel Watkins has turned his friends’ Facebook photos into compositions.

Have you every wondered what your Facebook photos would sound like? Facebook profile pictures are rarely considered art, but Los Angeles-based experimental musician and sound artist Daniel Watkins has used the photographs of his friends to create 463 unique compositions for piano.

In what he describes as a “sonfication project”, Watkins took the raw data from the JPEG files of his friends’ profile pictures and imported the data into a sound-editing program, exporting the results as WAV files. He then converted the files to MIDI to turn them into piano works. “This left me with 463 unique piano compositions derived from the raw data of these images of my friends,” Watkins explained in an article on The Creators Project. “I then transferred these composition onto individual cassette tapes creating a physical archive.”

^{Daniel Watkins’ installation, All My Friends}

The cassette tapes will form part of an installation, All My Friends, that will premiere in February next year in Marylands, USA, and Watkins has also prepared scores of the new piano works. “I have also created, and hand bound several volumes of music notation derived from these compositions that will display alongside the archive,” he said.

Two of the piano works are available for listening on Watkin’s website, a rumbling, tenebrous 19-minute-long composition titled Christina Santa Cruz and a shorter, bubblier work, Christopher Harris.

“The translation from image to sound, and then from sound into sculpture makes for images that are rather bad at being images,” says Watkins on his website, “but succeed because of the properties that arise from the act of translation.”