Michael Klingbeil’s SPEAR is a freeware application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis.

The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude.

SPEAR allows you to resynthesize a sound by computing and adding all of the individual time varying sinusoidal waves together. In most cases the result will not be exactly identical to the original sound.

Michael Klingbeil SPEAR

SPEAR – partials with a duration less than 0.1 seconds are selected (red)

SPEAR features

  • Detailed analysis of the time varying frequency content of a sound.
  • Flexible selection and immediate manipulation of analysis data.
  • Cut and paste, unlimited undo/redo.
  • Real-time synthesis of hundreds of simultaneous partials.
  • Documents may contain thousands of individual partials dispersed in time.
  • Supports a variety of standard file formats for the import and export of analysis data.

SPEAR is available for Windows and Mac and can be downloaded here (free, but the current versions will expire so perhaps v1.0 will not be free).

Visit Michael Klingbeil for more information. (Link via Marco Raaphorst)