PitchMage

PitchMage listens through your microphone and draws what it hears: a scrolling picture with low notes at the bottom, high notes at the top, and the newest sound at the right. What makes it different from an ordinary spectrogram is the color. Every sound is split two ways. One color is sound that holds a steady pitch — a sung note, a bowed string, a struck bell still ringing. The other is everything else — breath, consonants, percussion, handling noise, the general hiss of a room. A sound that is part one and part the other is drawn as a mix, in proportion, so the color is a reading rather than a label. A tone and a noise burst can carry exactly the same energy at exactly the same pitch, and a conventional display cannot tell them apart. PitchMage can, and shows you which is which as it happens. A singer can see the moment a note settles, and the moment it stops being supported. A player can watch an instrument's overtones appear above the note being played. Anyone can watch a room's background noise sit quietly out of the way while the sound they care about stands out from it. It is also fun to look at as it paints the world around you. FEATURES • Real-time display, about a twentieth of a second from sound to screen • Range of 27.5 Hz to 14 kHz • Two views: tone and noise together, or the tone alone • Four color schemes, including ones chosen to stay readable with color blindness • Freeze the display and drag back through the last minute • Three speeds, trading detail against how much history fits on screen • Background noise hidden by default, so quiet rooms stay quiet • iPhone and iPad, portrait and landscape PitchMage needs sound to show anything. In a silent room the display stays dark — that is it drawing what it hears. Hum, whistle, play something, or put on music. Everything happens on your device. PitchMage never records audio, never stores it, and sends nothing anywhere.