In order to better understand what I am hearing, or not hearing in some cases, I have started running various pieces of music through the spectrum display in Adobe Audition 1.5. This started based on discussions about what frequencies certain vocals used.
Here’s a good example that includes insturments and vocals, but isn’t too busy: Cold Cold Heart off of Norah Jones’ ‘Come Away with Me’ album. This first image shows the first ~22 seconds of the track with the lyrics overlaid along with some additional notes. The verticle scale goes from 0Hz to 22,000Hz.
As you can see, most of the energy is below 5,000Hz, so lets change the verticle axis to have a 5,500Hz max.
We can better see the bass notes are below 500Hz and the intro piano is in the 1,000Hz range (we’ll focus on those more next). We can also see vocal energy ranging from ~250Hz to above 1500Hz. Of course, in both this image and the prior one, we can see energy well above the vocal range during the vocals. I’m not sure what this is at the moment, but I’m guessing it’s an artifact of the recording or engineering process.
Here’s a close-up on the bass and piano section. Note the scale on both axes: 8 seconds and 1000Hz.
Not only do we see the primary bass notes between 50Hz and 200Hz, but we also see the harmonics of those notes at regular intervals above them. A few piano notes can also be seen in the upper part of the image.
