So I have recently finished up a project that took different sounds found in nature, and through the Spectrogram command, plotted the frequency of each sound over time with some really cool results!

https://www.maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=154346 

The contrast between sounds produced by the weather such as tornadoes, thunder, and hail versus something as innocuous as a buzzing bee, a chorus of crickets, or a purring cat really shows the variance in the different sounds we hear in our day to day life, while also creating some very interesting imagery.

My personal favourite was the cricket chorus, producing a very ordered image with some really cool spikes through many different frequencies as the crickets chirped, as shown here:

Using this plot, we can do some interesting things, like count the number of chirps in 8 seconds, which turns out to be 18-18.5. Why Is this important? Well, there’s a law known as Dolbear’s Law(shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law)  which uses the number of chirps in a minute for Fahrenheit, or 8 seconds for Celsius to calculate the temperature. Celsius is very simple, and just requires adding 5 to the number of chirps in 8 seconds, which gets us a temperature of 23C.

Tc= 5 + N8

For Fahrenheit, it’s a bit more complicated, as we need the chirps in a minute. This is around 132 chirps in our case. Putting that into the formula:

TF= 50 +((N60 – 40)/4)

Which gets us 73F, or 22.7C, so you can see that it works pretty well! Pretty cool, huh?

 

There was also some really cool images that were produced, like the thunder plot:

Which I personally really like due to the contrasting black and yellow spike that occurs. Overall this was a very fun project to do, getting to tweak the different colours and scales of each spectrogram, creating a story out of a sound. Hope you all enjoy it!


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