Week 2 Assignment

Hi, I'm Adi Niko from Chicago, Illinois, USA. This lesson is for Week 2 of Introduction To Music
Production at Coursera.org. I will be teaching the dierent methods and tools music producers use
to visualize sound.
The software I'll be using for this lesson are:
Logic Pro 9
its built-in oscillator
its music loop library
Ozone Insight metering plug-in
It's extremely important that we have tools to visualize sound because they help us understand the
sounds we hear, and also assign meaning to the measurement numbers that are often referred to
when mixing audio (for example, being able to understand what it means when someone says
there's a problematic peak at 1kHz). Seeing audio data visualized helps us better understand what
we hear.
There are three main ways we can visualize sound:
an oscilloscope
a spectrum analyzer
a spectrogram
I'll go through each and explain their parameters and functions.
Before describing each method of visualization, it's worth noting that displaying sound is itself a
challenge because sound travels as a longitudinal wave (with its amplitude moving in the same
direction as its propagation), not a transverse wave (where the amplitude is perpendicular to the
direction of propagation). Because of this, there's no good way to easily visually represent the
behavior of a longitudinal wave like sound, so we commonly visualize sound as if it was a
transverse wave (that is, as if it's motion was perpendicular to the direction it was traveling, so that
it looked like the motion of an ocean wave or a cowboy's whip.)

Oscilloscope
An oscilloscope displays a sound's amplitude at the present moment in time. The vertical axis
displays the amplitude (an objective measure of how much energy the sound has), while the
horizontal axis displays time. It actually shows a transverse representation of the longitudinal
compression and rarefaction of air the sound being played would create if played over speakers.
An oscilloscope can also be thought of as a microscopic, very zoomed-in view of an audio file's
waveform.
Here is a hardware oscilloscope displaying a sine wave at 440 Hz:

A problem with the oscilloscope's method of visualization is that it doesn't allow you to easily
determine what the frequency of the sound being monitored is.

Spectrum Analyzer
In contrast, a spectrum analyzer is used specifically to visualize what frequencies a sound contains.
The horizontal axis of a spectrum analyzer is frequency and the vertical axis is amplitude. Lowfrequency sound energy is shown on the left side, and high-frequency sound energy is on the right
side, thereby allowing you to see where on the frequency spectrum a sound has its energy.
A kick drum, for example, has a lot of energy in the low-frequency range (left-hand side) of a
spectrum analyzer's visualization, while a crash cymbal would have most of its energy in the highfrequency range (right hand side).
Here's a snapshot of the sine wave being played at 500 Hz (oscillating at 500 times per second).
You can see all the energy of the sound is concentrated around there. (It's worth noting that even
though the energy seems to extend to neighboring frequencies, this is only a limitation of the
display, and the energy only truly exists at 500 Hz).

Here is a spectrum analyzer displaying a square wave at 500 Hz, allowing you to see not only the
fundamental frequency at 500 Hz, but also the harmonics at integer multiples of that frequency
(e.g. 1500 Hz, 2500 Hz, etc.)

Below is a snapshot of a spectrum analyzer while playing a drum loop. On the left-hand side you'll
see the strong energy of the kick drum, while on the right side is the complex energy of the
cymbals.

A problem with a spectrum analyzer it that, like the oscilloscope, it's still just a momentary picture,
only showing the frequency content of a sound at a specific moment. This means that at every
moment, the frequencies of the sound you're analyzing change. One way for a spectrum analyzer
to help you get a better sense of the sound's history is by having a peak hold function, which can
show you how loud the sound as been recently. In the above snapshot, the peak hold function is
engaged, and is represented by the brighter green line that is highest. This shows you that recently,
that is the loudest the sound has been across the spectrum.

Spectrogram
A spectrogram is like a spectrum analyzer, but repeated over time to draw a continuous historical
view of the sound. The horizontal axis is time, the vertical axis is frequency, and the Z-axis (depth)
is amplitude.
Here is a spectrogram graph I made by changing the pitch of a sine wave oscillator. You can see it
continuously changes, tracking the changes I made to the sine wave's pitch. Notice how bright the
line is never changes because the amplitude never changed.

Here's a more complex spectrogram showing the frequency content of a drum loop. At the high
end is when the hi-hats play and the low-end is when the kick drum hits.

Reflection
I unfortunately couldn't find any tools within Logic to show an oscilloscope, and I would have
liked more time to give more examples of the way the tools are used. I also had problems
formatting the images, but I hope I explained everything clearly. Please let me know how I can
improve!