Spectrogram

Parameters

Controls and display

A pure analysis device — it never touches the audio. It has no knobs; everything on it is a question, not an edit. Three switches on the rail decide what you are looking at, and every combination is a usable face. Its ⏻ genuinely stops it: switching it off pauses the analysis (and the CPU that goes with it) rather than only dimming the title, and switching it back on refills the whole picture rather than splicing in a gap.

PICTURE — TAPE or RIDGE. The tape is the flat, measurable view: bars along the top (so you can see which bar the sub goes missing), a piano note ruler down the side with the C octaves ruled through the picture, and the loudest partial of every column traced as a single white thread — a vocal line reads as a drawn line, vibrato and all, instead of a smear. Hover anywhere and you get frequency, note, cents, level and the bar.beat it was played at.

The ridge shows the last twelve seconds in perspective: the newest spectrum is the lit ridge at the front and older columns recede into the dark, so a kick rolls toward you and a held note stands as a mountain range.

UNDER — the drawer below the picture. Bands runs the eight band histories (sub, bass, lo mid, mid, hi mid, pres, bril, air) plus momentary LUFS over the last minute, each lane with its mean and max: these are exactly the numbers the engineer reads through track.spectrogram, so when it says the low-mids build through the chorus, this is the picture it is looking at. Notes is a twelve-lane chroma tape — which pitch classes have been sounding — with the detected key and its confidence. Off gives the picture the whole face.

FULL drops the rail and lays the PEAK, LUFS and TILT readouts over the picture as glass, with the live slice as a curtain at the right edge. FREEZE holds the picture where it is; ENHANCED is the sharper (frequency-reassigned) analysis, where a harmonic renders as a one-bin thread rather than a blurred band.

The time axis is played audio, not the arrangement, so a stopped transport holds the picture rather than scrolling silence. Ask the engineer for any of it in words — "put the spectrogram on its ridge view", "show me the band lanes" — or set it directly with view.spectrogram_view {picture, under, full}.