The Spectrum Analyzer
Now, I’m not new to writing Spectrum Analyzers. Previous software engineering jobs had me writing controls for Windows-based Spectrum Analyzers in the past. However, these weren’t for audio visualization, but were more for scientific measurements of radio and microwave signals. One of the things I noticed about audio visualizations is that a lot of accuracy is ignored in favor of making the visualizer look and feel in line with what we perceive. I won’t go into great amounts of detail on this, but when you see funky methods being applied to FFT results in the source code, this is probably what is going on. One of the most common examples of this is that FFT data is never displayed on the Y-axis linearly, but rather using a square root function and a scaling factor. Without this, you see most of the visualizer moving very little, except for the occasional large burst of energy. This is NOT how your ears/brain perceive the sound you’re listening to.