Originally, I was working on a documentary for the golden records and the voyager spacecrafts when I found out how images were encoded into record discs. It works using AM (Amplitude Modulation) audio signals, creating an image by scanning left to right, where high volumes made high brightnesses. Many images were black and white, while coloured images were broken into the 3 channels for red, green and blue. This is where the idea came from to build a similar system into Dreams, using the audio importing website.

Converting images into audio was done using a python script, using the PIL and wave python libraries. Firstly, the inputted picture is pixelated into the desired resolution, breaks it into its separate colour channels, and creates a 90hz sine sound for each channel. Every 30th of a second, the amplitude is set between 0 and 1 based on pixel brightness intensity. Lastly, the audio is then split up into 30 second clips because of the audio import limits set on the website. 

These were the first imported images into the game, which used brightness of 3 separate paint strokes for RGB to create an image the same way a screen would. This version was impractical for games because it couldn't be baked, needing to be slowly re-rendered every time it was booted, severely limiting resolution too. 

Over time, these issues were fixed by combining these colours together and removing the brightness effect and baking these pixels into a permanent picture was made possible after a Dreams platform update.