Freesound Forums

How do you understand the second display for the sound samples?
One is a waveform that displays frequencies as different colors, but when I look at the other one, the word "spectrogram" comes to mind.
Anyhow, how do I understand that display?

The blog post, that introduced the spectorgams, recommends the wikipedia entry on it.

I sure wish there was a simple English entry for it though. Anybody interested in writing that?

I sure do wish there was one as well.
Anyhow, this sound (our dear-old-friend, the sine wave) from Bram, when looked at in a spectrogram, gives a good measure of the meaning of the spectrogram.
http://www.freesound.org/people/Bram/sounds/11/ (switch to the spectrogram view).
Based on what I see, I think it tells a little bit about what ferquency the sound lies at a particular point in time (and other frequency it touches around a "main, high-in-amplitude" frequency at that time).

The only way this seems to differ from the waveform is that the y-axis in the waveform stands for amplitude with the colors for frequency, whereas in the spectrogram, the y-axis is the frequency-position of the sound with the colors being the amplitude.

And I think I want to leave it at that even if I am wrong.

And I just looked at the spectrogram for one of my uploads. I think what's neat is that because the frequencies have been charted out along the y-axis as opposed to the amplitude, in the spectrogram, you can actually see which particular frequency is louder relative to the others at one point in time. I think that's bizarrely cool!

With much more information than a waveform, thus more useful.

Benboncan wrote:
With much more information than a waveform, thus more useful.

To add to this statement: With the proper training you can practically 'read' an audio file through a spectrogram. (I have this skill, so this waveform view is invaluable)