PitchMage

PitchMage listens through your microphone and draws what it hears: a scrolling picture with low notes at the bottom, high notes at the top, and the newest sound at the right. What makes it different from an ordinary spectrogram is the color. Every sound is split two ways. One color is sound that holds a steady pitch — a sung note, a bowed string, a struck bell still ringing. The other is everything else — breath, consonants, percussion, handling noise, the general hiss of a room. A sound that is part one and part the other is drawn as a mix, in proportion, so the color is a reading rather than a label. A tone and a noise burst can carry exactly the same energy at exactly the same pitch, and a conventional display cannot tell them apart. PitchMage can, and shows you which is which as it happens. A singer can see the moment a note settles, and the moment it stops being supported. A player…