Faculty of Arts & Science

Digital Futures

Leanna Barwick

Trinidad Reflections: Sound Frequency Analysis Visualization

I want to experiment to see if by translating soundfrequencies into visual data and observing distinctelements, that as a whole audible sound are notalways distinguishable, can new insights on theWa Samaki site be gained. A project I’ve wanted to program is a toolthat analyzes a sound file’s full frequencyspectrum and outputs that data as avisualization by drawing a shape basedon coded parameters assigned to eachpixel to represent variations.Many sound visualizers only measureone value, volume. FFT (Fast FourierTransform) is a function available in p5.js(a free and open-source JavaScriptlibrary for browser based creative coding)to do frequency analysis on sound files toextract and display the amplitude atmultiple frequency levels (i.e. low & highfrequencies) not just volume.