As an outreach project, our group designed and built a real-time Fourier transform audio visualizer that displays a scrolling time-frequency transform of audio signals. The design process involved professional musicians so that the final product would be optimized for the frequencies, amplitudes, and needs of performing musicians. The Gupta group is collaborating with the Mosaic Brass and the nonprofit Musical Fascination Association to bring the visualizer to school concerts to help students visualize frequency, pitch, harmonics, and harmony. The visualizer debuted in concert at the "MusIcIrcus" event with the Quake Ensemble on May 16, 2005 at the Benaroya Symphony Hall in Seattle, Washington. Quake was inspired by the 2001 Seattle earthquake and is dedicated to exploring new possibilities in performance. The visualizer is currently being utilized as an educational tool in EE signal processing classrooms. **Note: No musicians were harmed in the making of this product.**

Personnel:

Maya R. Gupta (EE Associate Professor)

Nate Jacobson (EE MS 2006)

Andrew Poole (UW BS EE 2007)

Don Immel (UW Professor)

Related Work:

Jazz and Signal Processing

Visualizing Remote Sensing Image Datasets