The phonochrome: a coherent spectro-temporal representation of sound

Abstract

Representation of simple stationary sounds can be given either in the temporal form by display of the waveform as function of time or in the spectral form by intensity and phase as function of frequency. For complex nonstationary sounds, e.g. animal vocalisations and human speech, a combined spectro-temporal representation is more directly associated with auditory perception. The well-known sonogram or dynamic power spectrum has a fixed spectro-temporal resolution and neglects phase relations of different spectral and temporal sound components. In this paper the complex spectro-temporal intensity density CoSTID) is presented as a coherent spectro-temporal image of a sound, based on the analytic signal representation. The CoSTID allows an arbitrary form of the spectro-temporal resolution and preserves phase relations of different sound components. Since the CoSTID is a complex function of two variables, it leads naturally to the use of colour images for the spectro-temporal representation of sound: the phonochrome. The phonochromes are shown for different technical and natural sounds. Applications of this technique for study of phonation and audition and for biomedical signal processing are indicated.