Quickstart Tutorial

If you have not completed the above two steps, see System Requirements for more information about what you need, and Installation for help with installing the software. This tutorial was made with VoceVista version 5.8.0. If you are using an older or newer version of the software, some things might look and work slightly differently.

While recording some sound, you have seen how the horizontal axis shows the time of the recording, and the vertical axis shows the frequency of the pitch at any given time.

Once your recording gets longer than a few seconds, you might want to choose which part of the recording you currently see. This can be done with scrolling and zooming the visible time range. Also, depending on the content that you are currently working with, you might want to change the visible frequency range. In this section we will do both.

In the last section we have played back the entire recording. But let’s say that we are interested in a specific part of the recording and want to repeat it a few times in a loop. To do that, you can select a time range by holding the Command key (on Mac) or the Control key (on PC), and then clicking and dragging the pointer over the time range that you want to select.

Do this now: Hold Command (or Control on PC), and then click on the pitch line at 3.5 seconds, and while holding the mouse button, drag the pointer to 5.5 seconds, and then release it. This should select the time range that encompasses the third note:

Now you can press Space to play the current selection. If the loop button on the toolbar is pressed, the selection will repeat until you stop playback. Try to move the edges of the selection with the mouse. This can be done even during playback.

Selecting a time range is not just for looping playback, but also for using this range for further analysis and averaging, and to apply edit commands.

To reset the selected time range, hold Command / Control and single-click anywhere in the main window. Alternatively, you can also invoke the menu Edit  Reset selection.

So far we’ve only looked at the pitch line, which shows the fundamental pitch of the recording. Now let’s look at the Spectrogram, which shows how loud the recording is at each point of the frequency range. Click on the Settings button on the toolbar , and then select Analyzer View on the left, and Acoustic on the top, to open the Analyzer View settings page:

Check the Spectrogram option on the left column, just under Long-term view. Then close the settings window.

Now you should already see the Spectrogram, but the screen might still be zoomed in very far from the previous step. On the toolbar, click on Settings Profiles and select the Standard Frequency Range profile. Then click on View  Zoom out fully. Now your screen should look similar to this:

The colors on the spectrogram indicate the intensity of the sound for each frequency. In other words, the spectrogram shows which frequencies are in the sound, and how loud they are. To see this in more detail at any given point in time, we can enable the Short-Term view, and in particular, the Spectrum. Reopen the Analyzer View settings page and check the Short-Term view and Spectrum options.

Now the screen is split into two parts. The left side contains the Long-Term view, which hows how the recording changes over time. The right side contains the Short-Term view, which shows details of the recording at the specific point in time where the green time cursor line is located. Move the pointer around over the spectrum with the mouse button held down, and observe how the spectrum changes as you move the cursor to different time positions. Now move the green cursor line to 8.0 seconds.

Move the brightness slider on the toolbar (as shown on Toolbar buttons) and see how the dynamic range of the spectrum and spectrogram changes in response to that. Adjust the brightness slider so that all peaks on the spectrum are fully visible. Then point at some of the spectral peaks on the right side and see how the text display on the Short-Term view shows the current frequency, nearest musical note, and intensity, for each peak in the spectrum:

So now you can see the that the sound in our recording contains many individual frequency components that have different levels of intensity. These are the harmonics. To better understand what this means, let’s use another feature of VoceVista: the Frequency Filter.

Frequency Filters are a tool that allows to pick out specific frequency ranges and listen to them in isolation, or to change their intensity to make them louder or softer. This helps to understand the spectral composition of the recorded sound.

Continuing with the same sample file ("A01_male_intervals.flac"), select the time range that encompasses the voiced part of the last sung note (hence select the range from 7.5 s to 9.5 s), and center the view on this range. Adjust the visible frequency range so that the fundamental pitch of the note is at the bottom of the screen, and the part around 3000 Hz can be clearly seen (hence set the frequency range to something like 80 Hz - 4000 Hz).

Now click on Filters  Add new frequency filter. Your screen should now look like this:

The grey frame at 100 Hertz is the Frequency Filter. It will remove all frequencies outside of its range. Check that the loop icon on the toolbar is pressed, and then start playback again and hear the effect of the filter. Then, while playback is running, move the filter up and down by dragging its grey frame with the mouse. You can change the width of the filter by dragging the red handles that appear when the mouse cursor hovers over the filter.

The spectrum on the right now shows a white outline of the original spectrum. The part in color is all that is left by the Frequency Filter. With this, you can listen to the individual harmonics or overtones in your sound.

Now click on Filters  Mute filtered frequencies to invert the filter. Instead of keeping only the frequencies inside of it, it now punches a hole in the spectrum by filtering out the frequencies in its range. To see this more clearly, set the brightness slider on the toolbar to -18 dB, and set the contrast slider to 60 dB. Drag the Frequency Filter to cover the range from 200 to 700 Hz, so that it removes the second, third, fourth and fifth harmonics in the recording:

Notice in Subtractive Frequency Filter how the Spectrum shows an outline of the second to fifth harmonics, while the other harmonics are in color. Once again, start playback, and move the filter up and down to hear its effect.

To remove the filter, click on the close button on its top right corner.

The Frequency Filter enables you to listen to the individual harmonics (or overtones) in a recording. A Note Slider is a complementary tool: it gives you a visual reference for a specific note or frequency, lets you count the harmonics that theoretically belong to that fundamental, and shows which note name and frequency they correspond to.

To add Note Sliders, first click on Settings Profiles on the toolbar and select the Single Row Toolbar profile. This will introduce a few new items on the toolbar. The two we are interested in now are the edit field for the number of Note Sliders, and the menu button to set the snap mode:

Each slider has a fundamental frequency and could be interpreted as a musical note, and it can show the over- and undertones corresponding to this frequency.

The Snap Mode determines what happens when you move the slider. If snapping is off, it will move freely. If snapping is enabled, the slider will snap to the nearest musical note on the piano, or the nearest peak in the spectrum. Snapping to a musical note would be used if you want to set the note that you want to sing, and snapping to the spectral peak would allow you to measure what you actually sung.

Set the Number of Sliders edit field on the toolbar to "1". This will add a single slider overlay on the screen. Click on the red line of the slider and drag it up and down.

Click on the icon of the Snap mode button to enable snapping. Then click on the down arrow on the right side of the button to open the button menu and switch between snapping to musical notes and spectral peaks. Observe how these actions change the behaviour of the slider line when you move it up and down.

Now position the green time cursor line in the middle of Note 5 (at around 8.5 s) to set the spectrum to that position. Then move the slider on the Short-Term view to align with the lowest harmonic. Now point at the right upward facing triangle of the slider and drag it all the way up. Your Short-Term view should now look something like this:

You can scroll down the Frequency Scale and zoom it slightly until you see enough detail of the Note Slider. The slider gives you a theoretical view of the overtones that belong to a particular sound. The labels of the slider lines show the number of the harmonic, its music note, and its frequency. The underlying Spectrogram shows the harmonics that are actually present in the recording. Click on the labels of the Note Slider and move the mouse up and down while holding the mouse button to hear the overtone scale belonging to the current fundamental pitch. Compare this to the actual overtones in the sound that you could hear with the Frequency Filter.

This concludes this quickstart guide. You have learned the basics of how to record and visualize sounds with VoceVista and had an introduction to the basic features and interface elements of the program. The main steps to remember are:

Next Steps

For a more detailed description of the interface elements introduced here, have a look at the chapter User Interface in the Reference Guide.