Spectrograms

In the second compulsory assignment in MUS2640 Sensing Sound and music, the students were tasked with a foundational exercise in audio analysis: creating spectrograms. Here I summarize how it went. The Assignment The core task was straightforward: Choose two distinct sound recordings. Students selected everything from musical instrument sounds and songs to environmental sounds like thunderstorms, boiling water, and animal calls. Generate visualizations in Sonic Visualiser. For each sound, they created a waveform (showing amplitude over time) and two types of spectrograms (showing frequency content over time). Compare linear and logarithmic scales. One spectrogram had to use a linear frequency axis and the other a logarithmic one. Write a reflection. Students described what they did and what they learned from comparing the sounds and the different visualizations. They were asked to do the exercise in the excellent open-source program Sonic Visualiser, but for those who wanted to do it in Python or MATLAB, that was fine. ...