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Chrome Music Lab (chromeexperiments.com)
171 points by Sparkenstein on Aug 5, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 30 comments



That spectrogramme view really is phenomenal, so effortlessly fast even while being kind of 3d.

I was talking about this the other day with someone, why don't DAWs push the spectrogramme view more forcefully, instead of the default wave view? There's so much more information to be gleaned in spectrogramme view than the waveform view.

I'm trying to learn to sing these days, and I'd been wondering if this was a good way to practice a song: look at a vocal stem of the song I'm trying to sing, and observe visual feedback of the spectrogramme.


While a spectrogram shows a lot of useful information, it also kind of doesn't. Your ears tell you much of the same thing except with better subjectivity, especially as your ears improve. You can tell (with practice) if a bass guitar is too bassy, or has too much "twang" or sounds harsh and throaty. But if a spectrogram of a bass guitar shows higher than usual frequency content in the 800-1200hz range, is the bass tone too twangy for the song, or is it just right?

The waveform view on the other hand will always remain useful no matter how good your ears get. If you're comping together multiple takes of the same section, or shifting tracks to adjust for phase-alignment in a multi-microphone setup. Doing this by looking directly at the samples is way less tedious than doing it by ear.

Also, though it's probably not an issue today, I would guess CPU concerns are another reason why a spectrogram isn't displayed by default on all tracks.


Another issue I can think of is that spectrogram view inherently looses temporal resolution the more precise you make it in the frequency space.


For everybody else who was wondering DAW = Digital Audio Workstation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation


Audacity isn't really a DAW but you can indeed switch the track displays to show a spectrogram, though it takes a while to compute. You can get spectrogram plugins for DAW's also that will display a real time spectrogram. Mastering software often includes a spectrogram tool.


Definitely click on the second to last icon on the bottom of the SPECTROGRAM page to see the spectrogram applied to an old POTS modem dialing out to another modem. Notice in particular that the DTMF touch tones are indeed composed of two tones.


You might give https://pitchy.ninja/game a try for practicing vocals.


Wavesurfer.js has a nice spectrogram plugin for audio files.

I also found out audio based classification trains your models on spectrogram images!


I will try Wavesurfer.

The things you're talking about... please talk more about them. What're some example applications of what you're talking about, for example?


Here is an article, I’ve just been learning about this myself

https://medium.com/x8-the-ai-community/audio-classification-...


"Making Music but every sound is Chrome Music Lab": https://youtu.be/6t86lJ-N9jo


Levi Niha is really underrated. He makes music out of everything, takes on the weirdest challenges with a healthy dose of optimism, and manages to teach some stuff along the way without really trying. I don't watch his videos that often but he's definitely amongst the people making youtube as a platform worthwhile.


Related, "Learning Music" by Ableton : https://learningmusic.ableton.com/


Works perfectly in Firefox too!! Hooray!

Disappointing that they stuck to standard equal temperament for everything but the harmonics and string-proporations stuff. There's no reason Kandinksy should be limited to the tempered pitches.



Wow. I've never actually used a live spectrogram, and it's really educational.

Use the mic input option and try saying different vowels, or different held consonants like "mmmm" vs "nnnn". It's really interesting to see how the patterns of overtones change, which is what makes the sounds unique.


It's also cool to try throat singing and watch the overtones change https://photos.app.goo.gl/DZxXKw6sKmxTJ9Wn9


there are several spectrogram apps for your phone. It is really fun to have them "on" all the time and see what can be heard around. My favourite patterns are those of an old, rusty door, scratching the floor as it opens.


On a related note (ah!) i found the Bandlab editor astounding. It's a fully functional simple DAW in the browser: https://www.bandlab.com/creation-features


I like Bandlab. I wish the mobile version let you mess with sound effects, but otherwise, it works great.


The "Song maker" tool is actually what inspired me to start creating music; I just randomly dragged my mouse around and found that I'd made something that sounded really cool. I've been playing around in LMMS[1] for some time now and hope to independently release some music at some point!

[1]: https://lmms.io/


Wow, it's fun! Reminds me of Pico-8 music editor.

The monkey and the drum sounds really badass.


As a piano teacher I've been teaching online since March and the Shared Piano part of the Chrome Music Lab has been really useful for demonstrating various concepts!


This reminds me of Mario Paint.


This is amazing, but I wish they would do more, this is like 5 years old.


I see how this could be as much fun as Scream Tracker was in 1992 :)


I don't know about music and I can be hours playing with this


Cool, just spent 30 minutes having fun on this one. Great stuff!


i'm curious what the intended purpose of these are -- very cool projects but doesn't necessarily showcase chrome (they work fine in firefox?). though maybe that's the point -- here are some awesome projects that showcase the state of the art in web in general.


wow this made my day!




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