Classical waveform isn't very practical for editing. For me, it's not even helpful for viewing. All I can tell is amplitude and some guess about pitch:
Maybe not even that - one of these is e
and other is E
, but they look almost the same.
There's however more suitable format to display sound. It's called Fourier transformation 1. And computers have implemented a fast algorithm called FFT - Fast Fourier Transform. It looks like this:
All strings on my guitar. Produced using this program I made in hope to create nice pure javasript guitar tuner. Relevant question.
Some description:
Ok, editing it in mspaint would probably not produce beautiful music, but maybe there would be a smarter way to edit this. Don't forget that what you see is a 3D function plot. These look like concave landscapes:
And many of us surely tried to edit 3D landscape in some game map editor. It's not that hard and allows you to do a lot of micro-edits.
Is there any software that provides convenient tools to edit the sound like that? Any tricks on that topic?
Edit:
I keep Googling and I found out that you can display sound as spectrogram (FFT) in Audacity:
But no editing there:
1: It doesn't apply on sound though - Fourier transformation is an important mathematics calculation in engineering - for any periodic function, it gives you sine and cosine coefficients to describe this function using sines and cosines only.