If you're anything like me, you've wondered what would happen if you used a compression algorithm for something it was not designed for. A lot of the time, the results are boring — you just get really large output.
However, image and audio codecs are special. Nowadays, psychoacoustic and psychovisual codecs are used — that is, codecs that are tuned specifically for human perception, and throw away information that humans will not notice. A great example of this is that most audio codecs will simply discard all audio frequencies above 20kHz. But the characteristics of the visual system and the auditory system are very different.
To explore this idea, I've created a dedicated page on my site with an interactive demo showing a sample image converted to audio, compressed with a lossy codec, and then back again, with various different codecs and parameters to choose from. That page has an extended introduction, I'll reproduce some of it here:
Just updated this with more codecs and an easier-to-use interface!
