[CLAM] Beginner basics

[David García Garzón]

On Monday 05 December 2011 07:42:08 Sean Walker wrote:
> I'm attempting to do some Spectral Analysis and I've found the
> SpectralAnalysis class and have been playing with the Network Editor as
> well as libclam and associated classes. I'm now trying to make sense out of
> the Spectrum class and the data produced by it. What I am looking to
> discover is what frequencies have what values and I can't quite make heads
> nor tails of the output. I've been playing with FFT_example.cxx and
> Spectrum_example.cxx as starting points. Now, can anyone direct me to a
> good resource for figuring out what Magnitude and Phase really mean to the
> uninitiated? Thanks!

The spectrum is an array of coefficients which are not just simple real numbers 
but complex numbers. So they have a real part and an imaginary part. They can 
be plotted as a point in the XY plane being the X the real and the Y the 
imaginary part. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number
If you had a vector to that point, the complex magnitude is the length of the 
vector and the phase is the angle from the X axis.

What you usually see in an spectrum view is just the magnitude. Not enough to 
reconstruct the original sound but it gives a nice idea of the 'energy' that 
the sound provides for such frequency.

Much more on fft: http://www.dsprelated.com/dspbooks/mdft/

David.