Hello lovers of album art, and welcome to a quick post dedicated to distorting them. Using a model (deepdream) by our favorite overlords, google, and code from a really great tutorial, I have generated some (what I guess I will call) “surrealed” images. Enjoy.

Generally I work in R for the stuff I do here, but in this case used another, even more popular computing language, python. Python is a much more general purpose computing language than R (it currently powers reddit as well as a whole host of other websites and projects). Like R, it is free, and unlike R, google wrote their “deepdream” code in python and made their model to interact with python.

(Install Instructions: To install python, I recommend downloading Anaconda with this tutorial as a guide. It downloads python, as well as many popular packages, and gives you an easy way to install packages. Unfortunately, it is a fairly large download (>300 mb’s). After install you will need to install multiple packages. You can install most, and probably all of them if you open a “command prompt” and type this in the command line

conda install tensorflow, bs4, pil, io, requests, numpy, matplotlib, urllib

Many of those will be part of the Anaconda, but just in case, run the line. Once Anaconda is installed, you can run the IDE packaged with it, spyder, and run the code from my script, found here.)

My relationship with python is much like the relationship any of you have with that friend of your friend you really like: you wish you could spend more time with them. I don’t really know R, except I can do some stuff in it, but I definitely don’t know python, and I can do less stuff in it.

I only have a working understanding of what the deepdream model does and how this code works to generate distorted images, but I also do not know how a hammer is made. Most the code comes from, again, this excellent tutorial. In order to run my code, a few things need to be done. One, you need all the requisite packages installed which I listed in my “Install Instructions” section. Two, you need all the “.py” files in my repository to be dowloaded into a directory on your computer, preferrably in its own folder. Three, you need to open a python console, preferably through an IDE like spyder, and set the working directory to be the location of the script and other “.py” files. Four, you need to uncomment the line starting with “#inception5h.maybe_download()” by deleting the hashmark. This downloads the deepdream model from google. It is about 50 mb’s in size, so be wary of that if you want to run this. You should uncomment it after you’ve run the script once so that you do not redownload it. Finally, run the script. I suggest googling/youtubing how to do each step if you are unsure. Again, friend of a friend.

By default, this script, will load and manipulate the first five images in this post.  A random deepdream model and random pieces of the model is applied to each image. If you have a specific album you want run through this algorithm, change the following lines …

link = 'http://www.sputnikmusic.com/album/177963/Catapilla-Changes/' # set album link here
filename = 'catapilla_changes.jpg' # set name of file to write in the /images/ folder

… with “link” being the url to the album you want, and “filename” being the filename it will write, specifically into the “/images/” subfolder found in the current working directory.

Have a Sputacular Halloween!

Images:

Heathen – Victims of Deception

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Axis: Bold as Love

Metallica – Master of Puppets

Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here

Tool – 10,000 Days

By Request:

The Stooges – Fun House

Akiyama / Carlsson / Nakamura / Olsson – in search of wild tulips

Artery Eruption – Gouging Out Eyes of Mutilated Infants

King Crimson – In The Court of King Crimson

Agalloch – Ashes Against the Grain

Lil Wop – Wopavelli 3

Chief Keef – Two Zero One Seven

Bjork – Debut

Tom Waits – Bad As Me

Turnover – Good Nature

Childish Gambino – Because The Internet

The Mars Volta – Noctourniquet

Everything Everything – Get To Heaven

Kate Bush – Hounds Of Love

The Clash – S/T

World’s End Girlfriend – Last Waltz

U.S. Maple – Long Hair in Three Stages

Radiohead – In Rainbows

Catapilla – Changes

Slint – Spiderland

QOTSA – …Like Clockwork

nara leao – Dez Anos Depois

Pig Destroyer – Terryfier

Defeated Sanity – Passages Into Deformity

Shiro Sagisu – The End of Evangelion

Red – Innocence and Instinct

Snoop Dogg – Bush

Neaera – Let The Tempest Come