Spectrogram Analysis

One of the most important steps in animation is called sound breakdown. It is the process by which an animator will listen to sound and figure out it's timing. It an animator is going to animate a voice of a character, they need to determine the timing of the pronunciation. If they are given music, they need to be figure out the timing of the notes.


In the old days, before digital was all the rage. The audio would be on a magnetic tape and they would play that backwards and forward very slowly to time everything out. It took along time, but was a good process. With the advent of digital technology, there has actually bit a turn for the worse for most audio breakdown. Most programs to play audio aren't very accurate and don't sound great when you try to slow something down a lot and scrub through it.


You may think that the waveform of a file would be useful in figuring out the timing. Wave forms are fairly useful when some basic sounds are happening, but soon they become useless when there are too many sounds.

What I have been looking into for the last year is a different way of representing sound: spectrograms.


A spectrogram is fairly simple to understand. On the horizontal axis time is represented from left to right. The vertical axis represents the frequency of the sound. The color represents the intensity of he sound.

This is an example of a spectrogram of piano and violin music. If you can see a spectrogram in action it becomes fairly easy to distinguish notes, chords, and other sorts of sounds. You can see rhythms, scales and all sorts of other parts of the music.


While it may not be immediately apparent, there is a vast amount of extra information visible in the spectrogram which is simply hidden in the waveform.


I have two suggestion for software if you would like to try out spectrogram analysis.

The first is only for windows, and I find mostly useful when you are starting out with spectrograms because it allows for real time analysis of sound. This means that if you have a microphone on your computer, you can make noises and seem them appear on the screen. I have spent hours making noises at my computer to see what they look like.

The program is Spectrogram 16.

It is only available for Windows. There are other versions of this program, Spectrogram 5.0, and others, but for some odd reason I can't get them to work well.

If can get the program working do the following.

Press- File/Scan Input

A whole bunch of options will appear, leave them at the default. Press OK.

Now if everything is working you can start making noises and seeing the results.

I would suggest trying whistling, talking, singing, instruments and whatever other things you can think up.

The second piece of software I suggest is much more robust, is compatible with Mac and Windows and is more useful for animation audio breakdown.

Sonic Visualizer

With this software you can import prerecorded sound files and really analyze them well.

To work with this program:

File-New Session

Then press File- Import Audio.

Now to see a spectrogram:

Press Layer - Add Melodic Range Spectrogram - All channels Mixed.

Now it should generate a nice spectrogram of your audio


I will stop now with this talk about spectrograms. There are lots of settings that can be adjusted which can drastically change the appearance of a spectrogram. I will have to write an even more in depth explanation of that in the future. In general it is good to play with the settings and look at the results. If it looks more useful it probably is.

 While I have been able to really get a full grasp on this more advanced topic of spectrogram analysis, it is possible to read spectrograms, meaning if you could determine what a person said simply by looking at the spectrogram.  This ability is extremely applicable to sound break down.  For more information  see Spectrogram Reading.

If you do start using spectrogram for audio analysis, I do want to end with one word of caution: Never stop listening to what you are doing.  If you allow yourself to fall into the trap of only looking at the sounds, you could miss something very important in the sound.  Spectrogram analysis is only a tool that helps the precision and accuracy of sound break down, it is not a replacement for listening.

Kyler

Free Will and Action

I think I might have stumbled upon a peculiar lapse in how my mind functions. It seems that when I have to start or stop something that I am doing, if there is no other influencing factor, my actions lag roughly fifteen minutes behind my thoughts.

The simplest example is playing the video game Geometry Wars. It is a game that is generally played over and over again, because each round lasts only about 3 minutes. The real difficulty is deciding when to stop, and then actually stopping. If you have nothing of urgent need to be done, there is simply no built in stopping point to the game, you simply have to make yourself stop. You have to decide that your done, and then actually turn the game off.

That may sound simple, but I suspect that it is not because there are less similar situations than one might suspect. Take for instance TV shows. You don’t have to consciously decide that you are over. The show ends. It tells you where to leave. Suppose you are playing a sport. Either there is a set time limit, like in soccer, or you will tire yourself out, natural endings.

To clarify, what I noticed was that there was roughly a ten to fifteen minute delay between my conscious decisions of action with no inherit force determining anything for me other than my mind. If this is true, it is of major importance. It means that I haven’t been making many “free will” decisions without a roughly fifteen minute lapse between mental decision and physical action.

So the real trick now is to notice when this is happening and tightening that timing up. As I have discussed before, I suspect this type of learning can happen incrementally over time. So as long as I do slightly better at this all of the time, I will get better at it.

Kyler

Pitch Sketchs

I'm going to try something new with my sketches. Instead of simply letting them float. I am going to annotate them with some comments. It will make me consider them more than if I simply post them as I am required to really take some time in Photoshop doing this.

These drawings are from my character animation course. The assignment is to animate a baseball pitch. These are the drawings from warming up.

















What did you think about this new format?

Kyler

Rediscovery of Sculpture

Well, it has happen again. I have rediscovered that I can sculpt. I discovered this once before in the post Fundamentally a Sculptor. But for some reason the lesson never seems to stick. I think it is because I have never really challenged myself to stick with it very long. But now I am going to get some plasticine, some armature wire and really start sculpting stuff in the same way that I would sketch things. Maybe I will even be able to animate some of them. That would be pretty cool.

What really got me to figure out how to sculpt with plasticine was when I figured out that I can't sculpt by primarily pushing the material around with my fingers. I needed to cut the material away. I have been using an Ulfa knife for the time being, until I get a few more tools.

This first image is almost the first thing I made after discovering to use a knife to carve. All of my anatomy and drawing abilities immediately became apparent. I knew exactly what I needed to do. I felt limited by my dexterity and my tools.



This little SUV was made because I have modeled it before in a 3d program, so it just seemed like a natural thing to try to make.

This was when my break through really happened. I just decided to attempt to make a female figure from my knowledge of anatomy. I didn't have wire for an armature, or enough plasticine, thus I couldn't complete it. What astonished me was the speed and ease with which I made it. It couldn't have been more than ten minutes, likely it was less, I don't know.






Anyways, I am going to keep this up, get more materials and tools as it will prove infinitely useful for my puppet animation class, my 3d animation class, and as a great skill to have.

Kyler

How to focus

In the comments of the last post, the question of how to get into a state of deep focus was brought up. There is a way to do everything and I think that this video shows the very extreme of what is necessary to focus.

Meet the Amazing Microsculptor

There are a few key elements that I think are important to extreme focus.

You need to determine exactly what you need to work on. If your working on a big project this means precisely identifying the work that needs the focus. In my example of the animation, I knew I needed the focus for the actual act of animation, of drawing. That is only one small step of a much larger set of things that needed to be done. I would suggest excluding all things are extraneous to the extreme focus work. Exclude preparation and finishing work. Reduce this segment of work to it's most dense form. If this means breaking up a larger project into many smaller sections, than by all means do that.

With a specific piece of work segmented from the rest as requiring extreme focus, start to develop a plan to do it. Schedule a time to do it, make all of the arrangements to be ready to do the work. This can mean cleaning your work space. Getting all of your tools prepared. Writing out detailed outlines. Doing some practice runs. All of these things need to get your mind ready for the work ahead. Allow the work to stew in your head for a few days before you do it.

I don't think this next advice is as obvious as you think once you hear it. Know your body and your brain, and prepare them as well. If this means getting enough sleep, get it. If this means eating good food, eat it. If this means drinking coffee, or not drink coffee, take the correct course of action (I can't focus well after drinking coffee, I think of hundreds of ideas, but I can't work). Take the time to warm up your brain with something before you start your work. Read over all of you outlines and really get prepared. In the video he makes it clear that he knows what works for him, that is why he can do things that are seemingly impossible. You need to figure out what will work for you.

Now just do the work. Turn off the music, turn off the web browsers, shut the door, turn down the lights, get everyone out of the room, tell them to stay away. Get to work. You may need to stay some willpower to stay on track, but as I said in the previous post, this gets stronger overtime, so start with realistic amounts of serious focus.

After you've done your work, make sure to take note of what worked, what didn't and then next time improve upon it.

You can't just jump into deep focused work, the key is preparation. When I shoot my film last year, that was eight intense hours in a camera room, but I had prepared for roughly 4 months for that moment, it made it really easy to focus, even if it still was a strain.

Hopefully this is useful to some. If you have other tips, please leave them in the comments.

Kyler

Focused

I'm sure not everybody has the same outlook on the world, but as a student the undercurrent of all of my life is how do I make myself better. At drawing. At studying. At math. At technology. At learning. At animation. At videogames. At relationships. At thinking. At focusing.

Along with this background goal is a belief that it is achievable by minute progress after thousands of days. Today the test was focus. I had to animate a large quantity of animation today. I find somethings very easy to focus on, exceptionally easy. But animation is hard. You have to look at your dope sheet, your timing sheet, think of character action, draw stuff, organize papers, organized numbers in your head, write down numbers, look at charts, move papers, flip papers, draw, erase, compare, think, draw, erase, write, think, listen, look, listen, look, draw, erase, move paper, organize paper, draw, erase.

If you don't get the idea of the animation, and the timing, through your head, onto papers, and then into drawings, it just doesn't work. If your not organized it doesn't work. So in the end, the fact is it requires extreme concentration. It is almost a painful amount of concentration because you know exactly how much work you have left to do and it seems immense.

But today, through what I would call sheer power of will, I managed to intensely focus on my work for first a two and a half hour stretch and then another one hour stretch. When I say intense focus, I mean there was nothing else going on, no music, no talking, no anything. Just animating and drinking water. After large sections of animation were complete I would just sit in my chair and take a break, but not get distracted with anything else.

Now how this ties in with what I was saying before is that I believe that not only was this an exercised in animation, it was an exercised in focus. Every time I am able to enter that state, I will get better and better at it. Over years it will hopefully become one of my most potent assets. A deadly unyielding ability to put my mind to things that are hard.

It's like moving a mountain with a soup spoon. You just need to be patient.

Kyler

Quality, Cooking, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I'm currently reading the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" with an unusual ferocity. This is because I can tell the book might help me answer questions about everything that I have been dealing with. It might help me understand my art better, and my life better and everything better.

I'm halfway through and one enormously important thing has been made clear. The book delves deeply into the question of quality. What is "quality"? Now the answer is drawn out over a lot of reading, but the part that I just read really struck me because of how I had an example in my life that fit exactly into what I just read.

What I just read was the distinction between "Quality is just what you like" and "Quality is what you like". The word "just" presupposes that your feelings are of no worth while value, when in truth they are all that matters in judgments of quality.

How this relates to me is my new found ability to make food that I really enjoy. I can actually cook. And it is really easy. I go to the store, buy food that I like, but in pots how I like, cook it how I like and it turns out wonderfully. I pay careful attention to what I'm doing because I care about how it turns out, and I care about the things I like, but it is the easiest thing in the world. Recipes act only as suggestions of what I can make, of how the chemistry works, of what might work. But it really just works when I cook.

Having the reason why my cooking works, while other parts of my creative experience feel like hard drawn out battles against myself is important. It means I know what to do know. I don't have to think hard about things in terms of are they good. I have to think hard about making up lots of ideas an then checking to see if I like them.

Kyler