pitch contour

[janew]

I am new to Audacity. I would like to see Audacity 1.3.x display a pitch contour (fundamental frequency on vertical axis, time being on the horizontal axis) for speech in real time. I clicked the Pitch (EAC) setting in the Audio Trac menu, but this didn't result in display of a pitch contour. I left frequency gain (dB) set to the default of 0 in spectrogram preferences, as advised in help function. Hoping this capability is present in 1.3.x. If not, is it available in Audacity 1.2? Thanks, Jane

[steve]

Audacity 1.3 has a spectrogram view for each audio track.
A spectrogram plots frequency on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. "Intensity" of the sound is represented by a colour shift which by default shows low level sound as blue, louder sounds as red, and loudest sounds as white. You can alternatively configure it to represent intensity in shades of grey with black being loudest.

This is the spectrogram of a rising tone that starts at 0 and rises to 20000 Hz using greyscale representation, a frequency range of 0 to 20 kHz and an FFT size of 1024 (Hanning)

rising frequency 0 - 20 kHz

firsttrack000.png (13.81 KiB) Viewed 1844 times

To enable the spectrogram view, click on the name of the track and select "Spectrogram" from the drop down menu.
The options are set in "Preferences" ("Edit menu > Preferences > Spectrograms") http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Spec ... references
I usually increase the FFT window size to 1024 for better frequency resolution, but note that the bigger the FFT window, the longer it takes to draw, so screen refreshes will be slower.

I don't know much about the Pitch (EAC) view other than it is intended to display the "pitch". Here is a representation of an A major scale played with a simple sine tone. (FFT size: 1024, Hanning, Min f: 20, Max f: 20000, gain 20, range 20)

A Major scale

firsttrack003.png (20.82 KiB) Viewed 1844 times

The human voice, as with other "natural" sounds, does not produce simple frequencies, but a rich blend of harmonics, so the spectrogram will be a lot more complex and difficult to "read" than these examples.

[kozikowski]

Audacity 1.3 has a spectrogram view for each audio track.

But it's not in real time. Audacity doesn't do anything in real time except record, play and certain timer functions. That's it.

Koz