Electroacoustic music analysis using the Lyrebird Environment Player

The approach to sonic visualisation used by the Lyrebird Environment Player of also has application to the analysis of electroacoustic music. As Grill and Flexer have indicated, traditional spectrogram “visualizations are highly abstract, lacking a direct relationship to perceptual attributes of sound” (2012). The approach employed by Lyrebird goes someway toward alleviating the problem of “demonstrating coindexation and segmentation due to the difficulty in illustrating differences in timbre” (Adkins 2008) in a spectrogram and provides an (almost) realtime feature analysis of the recording in which contours and timbral shifts are readily recognizable.
The image below shows a representation of Pierre Schaeffer’s Étude aux Chemins de Fer, clearly delineating segments of the work created with varied source materials. The colour scaling in this reading consistently colours sound objects of the same timbre/material. The entire 170 seconds of the work was represented by slowing the scrollrate of the lcd object. The insert shows the whistle that occurs at approximately 112 seconds into the work and illustrates the “Doppler” effect that is heard through a change of both vertical height (pitch) and colour (timbre). By coincidence(?) the Doppler shift is represented by a change from red(dish) to blue(ish) colours. A very small plot of the formal structure is shown below the Lyrebird analysis.