RubyConf 2023 - Re-interpreting Data by Murray Steele

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Published on January 1, 2024 8:00:00 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MrgQ7TzRUc

Duration: 44:32

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A talk about turning data into other data. Not particularly useful data, but imagine if you could listen to a jpeg, or see what an executable file looked like, or turn a zip file into an orchestral score?

Some time ago I stumbled across the header description for WAV files and wondered: what if I took a file and calculated the appropriate WAV file header for it, could I hear my data? Turns out, yes, you can. You probably don’t want to, but you can! In this talk we’ll explore how it works for WAV files, BMP files and MIDI files. Along the way we’ll learn a lot about using ruby to manipulate raw bytes and bits of data, but also we’ll hear a README file, view an executable, and listen to the ruby interpreter itself!