Sunday, July 12, 2009

Spectrograms

So as all of you know I listen to way too much music and take my music collection wayyy too seriously, so I doubt that you'll be surprised to learn that I've been experimenting with some music analysis programs this summer, and I've made some cool discoveries revolving around spectrograms of various songs. There are a few computer geniuses in the music world, and two of the top ones are Richard James (Aphex Twin) and Trent Reznor (NIN). Check out some of the images I found in spectrographic analysis of some of their songs...
This first image is from the end of Nine Inch Nail's "The Warning," off of Year Zero.
Pretty cool, if you guys have the song just listen to the static in the last few seconds, that's what the image represents.
Next is the end of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker.
This is the little swirly sound at the end of the song. I'd also like to suggest that you all watch the music video for the song, it's quite fucked up but also pretty funny and cool.
By far the coolest image I found is in the song:
\Delta M_i^{-1} = - \partial \sum_{n=1}^N D_i \left[ n \right] \left[ \sum_{j \in C \left[ i \right]}^{} F_{ji} \left[ n-1 \right] + Fext_i \left[ n^{-1} \right] \right]
which is typically just called "equation." This is the second track off of the Windowlicker EP.


Yes, that is Richard James' face. This is also at the end of the song.
So I'll definitely keep looking for more stuff like this, but I can't really think of other artists who are technically as ridiculous as NIN or AFX.

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