whats a graph called

[5lab]

that plots a sound against time, in a wavey line? ie time along the bottom, then pitch up the side... i figured it must have some shiney name?

[mmh]

a sound/time graph?
... i dont know

[MrFlibble]

I think it's just called a pitch/time graph unfortunatley. Don't know of any srubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishy name

[Knoxville]

Not sure what the graphs are called but they're created using an oscilliscope (or lots of complicated maths) and are used to show wavelength on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis If I remember rightly from year 11 physics.

[mike_w]

Oscilloscope?

[shiato storm]

a sine wave perhaps?

[5lab]

no, not an oscilloscope. that shows wave frequency.

i want something that scans left-right as you speak, taking up more graph as time goes on. the higher the pitch (or volume, i spose) the higher the line. no waves at all

[rajagra]

An oscilloscope (if you fed it with a microphone signal) would plot a graph of amplitude (air pressure) against time. That would be a waveform. But that's waves, which you say you don't mean.

Are you thinking of something more advanced, like a Fast-Fourier analysis / spectral analyisis?

[5lab]

spectral analysis sounds like it might be right..

like this

[Dr. X]

yep a frequency spectrum is what you're after. It's simply the frequency (as opposed to time) representation of the sound wave.

In winamp (or other) look at the oscilloscope trace and frequency spectrum, what's called Fourier Transforms can be used to convert the signal from the time domain into the frequency domain

[Twigman]

My contribution to the thread:
Fourier transformations are gay.

[5lab]

yep a frequency spectrum is what you're after. It's simply the frequency (as opposed to time) representation of the sound wave.

In winamp (or other) look at the oscilloscope trace and frequency spectrum, what's called Fourier Transforms can be used to convert the signal from the time domain into the frequency domain

are you sure?? i just want a line that shows the pitch of the sound over a period time. so if i played an scale, it would look like this

-
 -
  -
   -
    -
     -
      -
       -

see?

[silent ben]

i think you mean a freqency against time graph, which i dont think has a posh name (not that i can find on google or wikipedia anyway)

[ajbrun]

i'm assuming you mean a sound that goes from high to low high to low etc in a wavey sort of a fashion.

I believe any sort of a graph that is wavey in it's fashion is known as a sinusoid (sp?).