FlexibeatzII has released Paint2Sound, an application for Windows that turns images into sounds.

Paint2Sound is a neat little self-contained application for converting any existing .jpg or .bmp image, or any picture you care to draw/paint with it, into a soundscape. This application can bring a new dimension to your music making, or at the very least give you a unique way of coming up with interesting sounding samples.

The way it works is: Each pixel row of the image represents a frequency band. The application synthesizes sine waves from each pixel row with an instantaneous amplitude determined by the brightness of each pixel in the pixel row, and then sums together all the sine waves. User control is provided over various parameters like sample rate, sound duration, the distribution of frequencies across the pixel rows and the overall level in the mix of each sine wave.

Paint2Sound for Windows is a free download.

More information: Paint2Sound