apps.AppDB

Visually reverse engineer sound and music in real-time. See music and sound as it might appear on a live piano-roll MIDI music editor. The Hotpaw Music spectrograph presents a high-resolution scrolling spectrogram as you listen, so that you can see the patterns in sound and music, as well as how sound corresponds to notes on a piano keyboard. This piano alignment makes it far easier to spot which frequencies in a sound correspond to which musical notes. Music Spectrograph is a great visual tool to help a music student see notes (ones that they might not be able to hear clearly at first) and assist with music transcription.

Features include:
- 12th-octave MIDI-pitch-centered spectrograph (also called a sonogram)
- Usable with either live audio or tunes from your device's music library
- Up to a 4 minute spectrograph history you can stop, scroll back and review
- Slow Down tunes by up to 5X, or speed music up by 2X to skip sections faster
- Play tunes in mono, left or right channel only, or with center-panned vocals reduced
- Stop music in time, and still hear the music frequencies present via resynthesis
- Color frequencies to see if they are in-tune or out-of-tune
- Color frequencies for loudness, or graph in black-and-white or Pastel colors
- Mid-pitch filtering to remove higher overtones

Use the Tunes button to select a tune from your library (DRM protected iTunes files are not supported). Use the Gear button to select among several viewing modes. There's a volume control to manually set the sensitivity threshold. Stop playing or recording to scroll back and review or resynthesize sound. Touch the keyboard during resynthesis to isolate one note.

For many musical sounds, this app will show you lots of overtones and harmonics, not just the fundamental note pitches. Some musical experience is required to tell the real notes from the many overtones.