Noisey Parker

I am trying to use field recordings as the basis of Spectralist technique. I want to use the Pfft? to analyse the mode or the most frequent frequencies and use them as a sort of harmonic series.

Has anyone done this? I am using Jean-Francois Charles's spectral patches, but I need something to analyse the data. I've tried fiddle but it seems pretty inaccurate and only gives three frequencies. I don't need it to be done in real time.

pfft-can-you-analyse-the-fundamental-frequencies-of-an-inharmonic-sound-file

Given that most (if not all) flavours of FFT divide the spectrum into equal (linear) parts, the issue is that low frequency accuracy is rather poor while accuracy in the high range is much finer - In essence, this probably means it is no better suited to analysing harmonic material than inharmonic material.

From memory fiddle~ will report more than 3 frequencies (100?)- but only in list form which you will need to handle yourself. There is of course Analyzer~ more or less a fiddle~ lookalike and plain old fft~ and probably a few others, like FTM etc.. For analysis of spectral content its a good idea to go for a larger frame size which correlates with higher frequecy resolution across the spectrum and therefore a more accurate picture of the spectral content.

Not sure how you plan to go about this task, but maybe another possibility is to use another app like SPEAR (mac only but free) which is old but still works ok and will convert your sound in a partial representation and export a resynthesis or SDIF file (and you can progressively subtract partials below a certain threshold). Izotope's RX also contains useful UI and tools for spectral analysis and tweaking if you have access to it...

Given that most (if not all) flavours of FFT divide the spectrum into equal (linear) parts, the issue is that low frequency accuracy is rather poor while accuracy in the high range is much finer - In essence, this probably means it is no better suited to analysing harmonic material than inharmonic material.  

From memory fiddle~ will report more than 3 frequencies (100?)- but only in list form which you will need to handle yourself. There is of course Analyzer~ more or less a fiddle~ lookalike and plain old fft~ and probably a few others, like FTM etc.. For analysis of spectral content its a good idea to go for a larger frame size which correlates with higher frequecy resolution across the spectrum and therefore a more accurate picture of the spectral content. 

Not sure how you plan to go about this task, but maybe another possibility is to use another app like SPEAR (mac only but free) which is old but still works ok and will convert your sound in a partial representation and export a resynthesis or SDIF file (and you can progressively subtract partials below a certain threshold). Izotope's RX also contains useful UI and tools for spectral analysis and tweaking if you have access to it...


Thank you for your advice, I was considering trying to take a Mode average of the data stored in Capture~ do you think this will work, or have I misunderstood?

That would depend on what values you are actually going to capture - Audio? FFT frames? ...?

Edit: One thing I missed in my first response is that the question was about the *fundamental* of an inharmonic sound - which maybe explains the question better - yes -depending on the type of sound, it might be difficult to establish and probably irrelevant even if it can be. Nevertheless, for relatively stable sounds fourier analysis should still reveal the standout frequencies (or nodes)...

Edit: One thing I missed in my first response  is that the question was about the *fundamental* of an inharmonic sound  - which maybe explains the question better - yes -depending on the type of sound, it might be difficult to establish and probably irrelevant even if it can be. Nevertheless, for relatively stable sounds fourier analysis should still reveal the standout frequencies (or nodes)...


Hmmm, I'm a bit out of my depth to be honest. I thought I might be able to play say a minutes worth of audio into the fft~ for example and then have another object (similar to the way Histo connected to an itable works) give you number frequency. I was going to use 20hz to 20Khz in Intergers and look for the most common over time.

Pfft - Can you analyse the fundamental frequencies of an inharmonic sound file.