Although male musicians have always been able to milk a staggering amount of mileage (mostly artistic, but also sometimes financial) out of writing odes to lovely females, Dutch theatrical and film composer Jurriaan Andriessen's Portret van Hedwig goes much farther than usual -- the score to the piece is a portrait of the lucky lady.

Not surprisingly, it took him five years to finish, the bulk of which was presumably spent trying to get notes to conform to the image in a musically sensible manner. This is a triumph of old-school pen-and-paper brute force, because for all their strengths, I'm fairly certain that modern scoring programs like Finale and Sibelius would choke on something like this.

As a modern analogue, there's this track from Aphex Twin's 1999 Windowlicker EP -- it's known informally as "[Equation]," because the title is actually this:

Hidden images pop up when you run it through a spectrum analyzer.

(Aside: the action really starts around 4:36, but personally I think it's interesting to listen to the whole song for context. Also, since I have the track as an MP3, I muted the crappy YouTube audio just now and listened via iTunes as the video followed along; at the end, the Grease soundtrack came up in the shuffle queue, which, for a moment, was very confusing.)

The track title is misleading -- the visuals weren't actually programmed, but rather generated using the image-to-audio sound design program MetaSynth. Other people have done this sort of thing too, but it feels a bit cheap in the face of Andriessen's thing, doesn't it? All the same, it's interesting to watch the visuals unfold from 4:36 on as you listen to the results and consider the mental and philosophical game of Twister that must result from creating art of one format in a medium meant for another.