Marmot

I have a little knowledge of Max but not enough... I'd like to take a soundfile and make a spectral average of it, resulting in something like a spectral freeze but which is representative of the entire file. What is the best/easiest way to do this?

Hi,
I have a little knowledge of Max but not enough... I'd like to take a soundfile and make a spectral average of it, resulting in something like a spectral freeze but which is representative of the entire file. What is the best/easiest way to do this?
Thanks, Mark


spectral-average-of-a-soundfile

play it into an fft, record and accumulate the results?

reminds me of someone who did the spectral analysis of all the weekly top ten pop songs from the past 30 or 40 years and then sequenced the running average of those spectra (1 second per week I think, 52 secs a year, the whole piece went for maybe 1/2 hour or so. Cant remember who it was.

anyway couldn't help myself-- heres a basic version using pfft~ it's pretty self explanatory (uses a jitter matrix which accumulates, then normalized) albeit inflexible (pfft needs to be size of 8192).

hey good idea!
reminds me of someone who did the spectral analysis of all the weekly top ten pop songs from the past 30 or 40 years and then sequenced the running average of those spectra  (1 second per week I think, 52 secs a year, the whole piece went for maybe 1/2 hour or so. Cant remember who it was. 

The piece you're thinking about is by Luke DuBois (a Jitter developer BTW). It's called "Billboard".

The piece you're thinking about is by Luke DuBois (a Jitter developer BTW). It's called "Billboard".
http://lukedubois.com/ (choose Projects and scroll down...)


@zlp yep that's the one I think, although I'm sure I became aware of it way before 2005 (what it says on his website), more like the late '90s...

Spectral average of a soundfile