Spectrogram in Your Browser: Entrancing Real-Time 3D Pictures of Your Sounds

Web browsers can do more than log onto Facebook or show you the latest dog spinning vinyl. Spectrogram is a wonderful Chrome-based real-time Spectrogram viewer that could become very addictive.  

Who doesn’t enjoy looking at spectrograms? In your DAW or specialised audio software plugin, good spectrogram’s can make it easy to identify sounds and noise in an audio file you might wish to work on. Plus a 3D spectrogram like the one below is truly easy on the eye, which always helps.

But, for this to work you don’t need expensive audio editing software. You just need the Chrome web browser (though this all works in Safari on El Capitan OS X 10.11.4 for me except for the microphone input), and a link to Spectrogram.

It’s quite simple. simply visit this page on the Chrome Music Lab site to start playing with it. Click the greay circular buttons at the bottom of the screen to switch between different sounds. There's even a drum machine pattern in there. Click on the microphone to play yoru own custom sounds or you voice and get a visual representation of them.

The drum machine spectrogram

The drum machine spectrogram. 

Here’s what the creators have to say about Spectrogram:

A spectrogram is a picture of sound. A spectrogram shows the frequencies that make up the sound, from low to high, and how they change over time, from left to right. With this experiment you can compare spectrograms of different sounds, or use the mic to see what your own sounds look like.

Built by Jeramy Morrill and Boris Smus. Source code available here.

OK. So you might not be using this Spectrogram for yoru professional mixing or editing processes any time now, but it provides a glimpse into a future where the humble web browser is the platform used for music production and audio editing.

Web: https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Spectrogram

 

Rounik is the Executive Editor for Ask.Audio & macProVideo. He's built a crack team of professional musicians and writers to create one of the most visited online resources for news, review, tutorials and interviews for modern musician and producer. As an Apple Certified Trainer for Logic Pro Rounik has taught teachers, professional... Read More

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