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Friday, August 01, 2008

Deep Throat, Cetacean

What whales consider sexy… and what’s really going on in the audio band.

Ask and you shall receive. A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entry about some fascinating research on how hormonal changes can affect the attractiveness of a woman’s voice. In the entry, I wondered if there was an equivalent phenomenon for male voices.

A Blue Barry White

An article in the New York Times provides at least a partial answer.  Experts have noted that over the past 40 years, the mating song of the male blue whale has been getting deeper… by as much as 30%. Commercial whale-catching has declined over this period and whale populations are recovering, so experts theorize that the deeper voices are a form of sexual competition.

What does this have to do with film and video sound? The article uses spectrograms, a three dimensional chart of frequency and volume over time. They look like this:

image

The article even includes a clickable movie that lets you hear the whale’s voice as the spectrogram is being drawn. It’s a great introduction to a valuable tool.

Spectrograms show you the history of a sound, which makes them much more useful than the dancing-light spectrum analyzer found on some boomboxes and mp3 software. So I just put a tutorial on my own website that uses them, along with audio recordings, to explain what’s really happening at different frequencies in a soundtrack.

The tutorial lives here. Take a look. You might be surprised to learn how the bottom 5 kHz of a track conveys a lot more than the top 15 kHz. It might even change the way you use equalizers when mixing.

Audio • Post Production •

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