In The Beginning...

So in the beginning....I bit off way more than I could chew. I originally listened to the audio file and thought neat which it is. Whale song's are super complex beasts (I may have wiki-dived a smidge) and there is a lot about them that is unique in an audio sense. But...I'm not musically inclined. I play the drums but that isn't conducive to whale song. So I thought no biggy, whale song is audio, which is sound, which is just a bunch of sinusoidal waves right?

"I will make an animation in Desmos." I thought.

And then that turned out to be much much harder than I thought it would be. Whoops. So I went back to the drawing board, I didn't have time to draw out individual frames on Desmos, and I can't make a song. But what I can make is something graphical.

And so I did that.

What do I mean by readable whale song?

I mean I took the original audio file and I gave it to my trusty notepad plus to give it a good read over for me....in binary converted to ASCII of course. So that .ogg file trying to be read by my notepad game me a bunch of "random" characters, or really binary that my notepad converted over.

And then what?

And as a huge fan of ASCII art I thought...using the converted ASCII files in the Whale Song audio file, I'm gonna make a whale.

And then I did that.

For me this was kind of an exploratory piece. I tried some things that didn't work, and then I found some cool stuff that did work!

And then I made a whale with a bunch of letters. That's pretty cool. I was almost stubbornly determined to not make something audio for this and am pleased to say I succeeded.

I mean...check out this still from the final piece...that's pretty cool.

So what's the final result

This cool GIF I made! I wish I could've gotten the final result with a smidge less compression, but hey it's ASCII animated whale art that I made using the text rendition of an audio file. I'll count that as a win.

Is this a bit rough around the edges? Did I rush this submission? Maybe. But she's done and that's that.