How can we capture the dimensions of a song? Spectrograms are snapshots of sounds over time, and can be used to better understand their acoustic characteristics. Gain a deeper appreciation for music by learning how to analyze the spectrograms of a few of our favorite songs.
TRANSCRIPT:
Now let’s play a little bit with sound. You can see obviously the notes. Each note has a different frequency, and that will be the melody. To recognize the instrument, that is the formants that gives the depths and the nuances of each instrument, which is represented in this, not just the highest frequency, but the shape of the rest of the pattern.
So, let’s look at some pre-recorded music. For example, this one here, that’s the waveform. Let’s look at the spectrogram. You will see that it starts down here and then there is this interesting gliding upward pattern. Let’s listen to it.
So, it’s a lot of fun, and very interesting to look at the sounds through the spectrogram. I’m just going to end with some music, which is also the human voice in this remarkable recording from 1936 by Marian Anderson. It starts with the piano, you can see the notes here, and then the human voice begins with the amazing, harmonics, of Marian Anderson.
