The Sound of GIFs

What to make of GIFbites isn’t quite clear, not yet. It’s billed itself as a weekly podcast, each episode no longer than 15 seconds, and its name makes its visual orientation evident, even if the association between image and sound is less so.

There are images; a different one accompanies each of the podcast’s two initial episodes. The audio to the first podcast is a description of the image itself: — “emerging from a Golden Girl like a cut-and-paste ghost perambulates a long-haired white wolf bear …”

The second is non-verbal, a mumble of an industrial rhythm that seems to mirror the dentil pattern of the track’s image.

The project brings to mind something discussed here last year: “Wondering if there’s a sonic equivalent of (or parallel to) an animated GIF, and if so what it is”; perhaps the series is a matter of media translation. The project is by Daniel Rourke, whose home on the web is at machinemachine.net, where he makes the following comment about format agnosticism: “I don’t feel the need to distinguish between words, links, videos and images. This website is my attempt to play between their differences.”

The tracks were originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/gifbites. Audience submissions are invited.