This project evolved during a voluntary class offered in the third year of college preparatory school at the Gymnasium Waidhofen in Thaya. The project was about creating a system to transform images into sounds using a record player; in other words, making a kind of CD by hand.

After we had finished setting up the record player, we proceeded to the more technical part of our work. Matthias and Bernhard built a light sensor out of different wires, a light-emitting diode and a matchbox. Victoria and Anna had first glued black cardboard all over the box so that no light could get through. The hardest part was the soldering, which took a number of minutes. We attached the sensor to a record player that our teacher had brought to school. Beforehand, we had prepared some aluminum foil, painting different colors on it so it would produce a variety of tones; in it we wrapped a plastic record which our teacher had ordered. Then we turned on the record player and eagerly waited. Unfortunately we couldn’t hear a thing. So we connected it to a frequency converter which Professor Skala had built at home; this is when the first real sounds were produced. Then we recorded these sounds with a computer. The operating system of this computer was very old. The program we used to make our recordings was Creative Wave Studio.

Then we wanted to listen to what we had made, but the computer was incapable of playing it. In the end we tried it with Linux operating system. Finally we could hear it—but by no means did it knock our socks off. So we sent the tones through a frequency converter. When we added a little echo, it sounded fantastic.