Spectrogram

A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data is represented in a 3D plot they may be called waterfalls.Spectrogram of this recording of a violin playing. Note the harmonics occurring at whole-number multiples of the fundamental frequency.3D surface spectrogram of a part from a music piece.Spectrogram of a male voice saying 'ta ta ta'.Spectrogram of dolphin vocalizations; chirps, clicks and harmonizing are visible as inverted Vs, vertical lines and horizontal striations respectively.Spectrogram of an FM signal. In this case the signal frequency is modulated with a sinusoidal frequency vs. time profile.Spectrum above and waterfall (Spectrogram) below of an 8MHz wide PAL-I Television signal.Spectrogram of great tit song.Spectrogram of a gravitational wave (GW170817).Spectrogram and waterfalls of 3 whistled notes. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data is represented in a 3D plot they may be called waterfalls. Spectrograms are used extensively in the fields of music, sonar, radar, and speech processing, seismology, and others. Spectrograms of audio can be used to identify spoken words phonetically, and to analyse the various calls of animals. A spectrogram can be generated by an optical spectrometer, a bank of band-pass filters, by Fourier transform or by a wavelet transform (in which case it is also known as a scaleogram). A spectrogram is usually depicted as a heat map, i.e., as an image with the intensity shown by varying the colour or brightness. A common format is a graph with two geometric dimensions: one axis represents time, and the other axis represents frequency; a third dimension indicating the amplitude of a particular frequency at a particular time is represented by the intensity or color of each point in the image. There are many variations of format: sometimes the vertical and horizontal axes are switched, so time runs up and down; sometimes as a waterfall plot where the amplitude is represented by height of a 3D surface instead of color or intensity. The frequency and amplitude axes can be either linear or logarithmic, depending on what the graph is being used for. Audio would usually be represented with a logarithmic amplitude axis (probably in decibels, or dB), and frequency would be linear to emphasize harmonic relationships, or logarithmic to emphasize musical, tonal relationships. Spectrograms of light may be created directly using an optical spectrometer over time. Spectrograms may be created from a time-domain signal in one of two ways: approximated as a filterbank that results from a series of band-pass filters (this was the only way before the advent of modern digital signal processing), or calculated from the time signal using the Fourier transform. These two methods actually form two different time–frequency representations, but are equivalent under some conditions. The bandpass filters method usually uses analog processing to divide the input signal into frequency bands; the magnitude of each filter's output controls a transducer that records the spectrogram as an image on paper.