A Perceptually Meaningful Audio Visualizer

I pay a lot of attention to details in sound. I wanted to be able to see these details, and also point them out while describing sounds to people. Unfortunately, most audio visualizers don’t reveal these details. So I created Audioscope, and made a video and soundtrack to demonstrate how some of these fine sonic details are made visible and obvious:

Technically: The y axis is the raw audio signal, and the x axis is the signal filtered such that every frequency is phase shifted by 90˚.

Helices turn out to be a mathematically simple way of working with signals. In my opinion, it’s also a more natural way of interpreting audio signals. Given a pure sine wave sound, while converting it to a helix requires you to add an imaginary component to the signal, the resulting helix is more representative of the purity of the sound, since the radius/magnitude is constant.

Because we can decompose signals into component sine waves, and convert sine waves into circles, we can convert every component sine wave of a signal into circles, and represent the signal as a sum of circles, where the y axis is the original signal, and the x axis is the signal with every component sine wave phase shifted by 90˚.

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