Spectrogram

"Sonograph" redirects here. For the musical recording, see Sonograph (EP).
For the scientific instrument, see Optical spectrograph.
Spectrogram of the spoken words "nineteenth century". Frequencies are shown increasing up the vertical axis, and time on the horizontal axis. The legend to the right shows that the color intensity increases with the density.
A 3D spectrogram: The RF spectrum of a battery charger is shown over time

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 are represented in a 3D plot they may be called waterfall displays.

Spectrograms are used extensively in the fields of music, linguistics, sonar, radar, speech processing,[1] seismology, ornithology, 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 or scalogram).[2]

Scaleograms from the DWT and CWT for an audio sample

A spectrogram is usually depicted as a heat map, i.e., as an image with the intensity shown by varying the colour or brightness.

  1. ^ JL Flanagan, Speech Analysis, Synthesis and Perception, Springer- Verlag, New York, 1972
  2. ^ Sejdic, E.; Djurovic, I.; Stankovic, L. (August 2008). "Quantitative Performance Analysis of Scalogram as Instantaneous Frequency Estimator". IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. 56 (8): 3837–3845. Bibcode:2008ITSP...56.3837S. doi:10.1109/TSP.2008.924856. ISSN 1053-587X. S2CID 16396084.