There are several good software applications for analyzing sound on the market. But we could not find any that help to visualize the musical interpretation of the sound. Most spectrum analyzers are optimized for experts with a background in the physics of sound. Musicians are not normally trained to read physical data. Hence it is useful for musicians to relate the physical representation of the sound to the musical terms that they are familiar with.
Therefore we started to add visual aids to the spectrum analyzer that make the visual representation of frequencies accessible to musicians directly and intuitively. The addition of a musical staff and a piano keyboard already simplified things greatly. A further step to enhance the understandability of spectrograms was to switch from the linear frequency scale that is common in physics to the logarithmic scale that is more familiar to musicians (because it more closely models how the ear perceives pitch). The Overtone Slider highlights the relationship between a fundamental and its overtones in a direct and intuitive way and helps to simplify the understanding of the sometimes very complex spectrograms.
