Spear

I'm tired of Max/MSP and PD. Graphical programming just isn't as powerful as programming, and at the moment it isn't that intuitive either. So I've been looking for other software to use, and one of them I've found is called spear.

Spear uses fft analysis on any wav file of your choice to graphically display all the frequencies that make up a complex sound. Sort of like ms paint for sound, you can then manipulate the waves any way you desire.

On the y axis is the frequency of the sound, and the x axis is time. The darker the line, the louder that frequency is. Of course, the analysis itself isn't perfect, but it's more than enough to be able to mess around with the sound. You can select harmonics, scrub, pitch shift, and time stretch (among other things).

I mention spear because I was originally going to use it in conjunction with cubase to write this song that I'm working on. It turns out that my samples (namely the human voice) are really hard to transform with fft analysis. Even though they may not make it into the final cut, here is a voice sample and its manipulation in spear.