Backmasking is for wusses

[lederhosen]

A spectrogram is a visual representation of a sound, created by breaking that sound into short intervals and then analysing the frequencies present in each interval.



This page has some examples (one just below) - spectrograms from whale whistles, and attempts to reduce noise from those same sounds. The further the colour is towards red on the graph, the stronger those frequencies are.



Here's the song of the Prothonotary Warbler, in spectrogram form (click here to hear the sound):



From this page, a spectrogram of the word 'compute':



And here's a spectrogram from track 2 of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker EP.



From track 1, 'Windowlicker':



And from Venetian Snares' "Look", off the album "Songs About My Cats":



More about this stuff here and here.

Comments

[cavalaxis]

His stuff always makes me slightly sick to my stomach. I'll be listening to a track, sinking into it a bit, and then, I feel as if I'm trying to read in a moving car. Weirdness. I wonder if this isn't the reason why.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

(grin) Having flashbacks of Fourier and Laplace Transforms. :-)

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

My. Brain. Hurts.

This is frightening. I don't know why. It is natural enough, that once we could turn sound into visual art, that someone would devise a convention for going the other way, but...

I am responding on a purely emotional level here, in case it was not obvious.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Aphex Twin is a special sort of creepy. The video clip to his 'Come To Daddy' is one of the most disturbing things I've seen in a long long time.