August 2, 2019

Trump’s Signature Looks Like an Audio Waveform. So We Synthesized Sound From It.

“The only thing to do with Donald Trump that has ever ended on a high note.”

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President Trump’s signature has been scrawled across 8×10 glossies, MAGA hats, and controversial executive orders. It’s been analyzed by handwriting experts and parodied by meme experts. But one thing stands out most about his signature: it looks like an audio waveform.

Through the miracle of science, researchers have been able to convert images into signals, and then signals into audio. Why not create sound from an image of the president’s signature?

Alas, the Mother Jones Forensic Audio Reconstruction Team was out of the office. So I sufficed by plugging in an image of Trump’s signature into a site called PIXELSYNTH, a project by computer programmer and media artist Olivia Jack, for an entirely non-scientific representation of the staccato slopes and peaks of one of the most powerful signatures in the world.

After a bit of tweaking, I got the following results:

Listen and let us know what you think it sounds like.

As one Twitter user suggested, it’s the “only thing to do with Donald Trump that has ever ended on a high note.”

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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