See sound
Pick a sound, or turn on your microphone. Time runs left to right, pitch runs bottom to top, and the brighter a spot is the louder that pitch was at that moment. Point at the picture to read exact numbers.
Pick a sound
One note at 196 Hz, with overtones stacked evenly above it. That stack is why it sounds like a guitar and not a flute.
Detail
2048samplesThis is the tradeoff, and it is the whole lesson. Sharper timing blurs the pitch; finer pitch blurs the timing. Nothing makes both sharp at once.
One bar always shrinks as the other grows. Nothing makes both short.
Fine-tune
The controls the picture is actually made of. None of it is needed to read it.
How much each window shares with the last one. It sets the hop.
Hann — cosine taper, the usual choice
Cutting a signal off abruptly invents frequencies that were never in it — leakage. A taper is how that is kept down.
Which slice of dB the colour ramp is stretched across.
Linear is what the FFT returns, log matches how pitch is heard, mel matches how hearing spaces it out.