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.

Green is sound that holds a steady pitch — a sung note, a bowed string, a struck bell still ringing. Red is everything else — breath, consonants, percussion, handling noise, the general hiss of a room.

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 and interesting to look at.

FEATURES

• Real-time display, about a twentieth of a second from sound to screen • Two views: tone and noise together, or the tone alone through a color scale • 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.

Discovery signals