random sounds?

michaewlewis

Has anyone ever heard of generating sound from a random exe file? I was just going through a random thought moment and was wondering what it would sound like..... I mean, just play the binary data from a exe as if it were a wav or mp3 or whatever
Any programs that will do it?
What if there is a exe out there that actually has a message about the beginning of the world or who the next president will be..... or maybe just a bunch of static and whistles. Who knows.

michaewlewis

no takers? okay. I'm still curious, I'll just do a bit more searching. There's got to be at least one other person in the world that has wondered what an exe sounds like.

bpat1434

How would you do it? Read the hash of the file? Read the bits of the file? How? And why?

michaewlewis

How? Probably by confusing a program into thinking that winmine.exe is a wav or mp3.
Why? Just to see if it could be done and what it sounds like. Just like every other reason to come up with something. Pure Curiosity.

thorpe

In Linux you could send the output of a file to your soundcard, I could guarantee it wouldn't be pretty though.

cat some.exe > /proc/asound/seq 2>/dev/null

michaewlewis

I'll give it a try when I get home, and tomorrow, I will tell you the meaning of life according to explorer.exe

bpat1434

Right Click -> Open with.... -> Windows Media Player

I guess that's one way to do it....

thorpe

Ide make sure your speakers are real low.

michaewlewis

Windows Media Player gets confused even when you rename the file winmine.wav, I think the linux idea is getting closer 🙂

void_function

Digital sound is abstract and virtual phenomenon. You must specify the encoding. The most used one is pulse code modulation. Any decent audio processing software, like CoolEdit, SoundForge, WaveLab, Audacity, can open a "raw" audio and you must specify encoding. So, there is no "one" sound of an exe file.

michaewlewis

In that case, you could record yourself asking a question in wav format and listen to it as an mp3. You think you would ever get the right answer? 😛

void_function

Well, you can't. MP3 decoders demand exact mp3 file format.

michaewlewis

hmmm.... there's got to be a way to trick it though.

void_function

There is no way to trick it. You're confusing file format with container with audio. You could, though, compress your WAV into MP3 and then play MP3 as if it was a RAW sourcefile, which would not be much different from playing any other binary stream that is not in fact PCM sound.

michaewlewis

well, I used audacity to listen to the raw data of winmine.exe, and it sounded kinda neat. It started out as a little static and then went into what sounded like a note on a piano and then a snare drum. 🙂
what's next I wonder?

Weedpacket

It's faintly amusing to accidentally ftp an MP3 file as text between machines with different line ending rules.... it kind of indicates how little error checking there is in an MP3 file after the header.