What is a spectrogram?
Sound invisible, always in motion and intangible. Our ears perceive sound as a series of waves with changes in amplitude, frequency and harmonics moving through the air. The intangible properties and constant motion of sound are the exact reason why it is so hard to interpret sound patterns. Spectrograms change all of that. Spectrograms give us the power to take a sound or series of sounds, plot them in real time and make an interpretable data formation out of them. Spectrograms, also known as sonograms, are computer programs that convert the varying intensity of an acoustic signal into a visual representation that is plotted on a graph according to its intensity. In most traditional spectrograms a grayscale pallet has been used, however as times and technology has changed so too has the spectrogram. In the grayscale format the degree of darkness at any given point is directly proportional to its amplitude (sound energy) at that time and frequency. Most modern spectrogram software prog
