Great Idea – Spectral Eye Review

Well, I can say it's a great idea, because I had the very same idea. I haven't written such an app yet, but I intend to. Some of the problems I anticipated are realized in this app. One of them is that FFT divisions don't line up with musical notes well. FFT is linear, and sound is logarithmic. You can see this by looking at the spiral. The higher notes have many dots between them. The lower notes each share a dot. The result is that it is somewhat useful for middle C and higher, but the octave below middle C is passable, and octaves below that are not that useful. This is very apparent when listening to music. The melody is usually easy to follow, but the bass line is muddy, if even discernible at all. Ideally, it should dance well visually with the melody. This may require some sort of encoding to a logarithmic data set where the FFT can be applied. Having said all this, I will be bringing the app to the club the next time I go to listen to some music. An FFT with finer resolution would also solve the problem, but, of course, there is a trade off between FFT resolution and performance. Use too high a resolution, and you won't be able to use a high enough sampling rate. I'd also like to see things besides octaves modeled. For example, thirds and fifths are important in music, too. These could be modeled with tighter spirals. Or maybe dots of a different color shown third away, etc. There are all sorts of possibilities.
Review by Victorplmju on Spectral Eye.