Why flip you off while typing when he can flip you off with the sound of his typing?
A spectrogram is a way of visualizing audio where sounds are mapped out depending on their pitch. High-pitch sounds go higher on the spectrogram, low-pitch sounds go lower. This has led to many audio wizzes deciding to repurpose audio as a visual medium, commonly as an Easter Egg. Next time you hear some strange fuzzy noise, or a series of seemingly disconnected beeps, consider whether it's really just that...
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Chainsaw Man: In the last scene (Stinger not included) of the last episode of Season 1 of the anime, there's a noise as the door Pochita's behind moves away from Denji in his dream. The resulting image
is a horrifyingly warped image of Makima, sporting a grin that splits her face in half, representing how this was the moment she figured out how to break Denji's contract with Pochita.
Live-Action TV
- Mr. Robot: Season 2, Episode 5 opens with five seconds of garbled static. The spectrogram of this static forms the famous "Hang in there, Baby!" motivational poster. This same poster is later seen when Angela is being initiated by Whiterose in the finale.
Music
- Aphex Twin:
- The song "Equation" has a tone which, if you run it through a spectrograph, forms a picture of (Aphex Twin sole member) Richard D. James's face.
- The song "Windowlicker" ends with a high-pitched tone that forms an image of a spiral when viewed in a spectrograph.
- The Avalanches: "Star Song.IMG" from We Will Always Love You is an image of the actress Barbara Payton in sound form. The album cover itself also references this trope.
- Information Society's album Hello World has a "Hidden Code" track which when viewed in a spectrogram, displays a URL and login credentials for two bonus MP3s: a cover of Gary Numan's "Praying to the Aliens" (later featured as a normal track on their cover album Orders of Magnitude), and "Dancing with Strangers(Kurt's Doomvox Mix)".
- Neil Cicierega's mashup album Mouth Dreams warns you "DO NOT TRUST SHREK" in the "extro" track... backwards, in Wingdings◊.
- In Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails, the spectrogram of the song "The Warning"◊ depicts The Presence, a giant hand reaching down from the sky that is referenced in the album's associated Alternate Reality Game.
- The closing track of Venetian Snares's Songs About My Cats, "Look", will display images of cats when played in a spectrogram.
Video Games
- Responsible of C418, Minecraft's incredibly creepy "11" music disc has some noise at the end, which features drawings of what appear to be the default player's face and C418's autograph. There's also a creeper face hidden in a seemingly innocent random ambiance file.
- A Cuphead easter egg, long thought to be Copy Protection, involves replacing the title screen theme with its demonic-sounding version, which shows the Devil's sprites in his boss fight when inspected with a spectrogram.
- Doom:
- In the Doom (2016) soundtrack, the track "Cyberdemon" features a repeated 666 and an inverted pentagram in the spectrogram view. Mick Gordon explains the process, and his motivation, in a GDC talk from 2017.
- Likewise, the Doom Eternal soundtrack has a recreation of the Doom II poster art in the track "Welcome Home Great Slayer".
- In the Doom (2016) soundtrack, the track "Cyberdemon" features a repeated 666 and an inverted pentagram in the spectrogram view. Mick Gordon explains the process, and his motivation, in a GDC talk from 2017
- Myst: A vinyl-record release for the soundtrack in 2022 has a special bonus track recorded ostensibly by the real-life Atrusnote , where he is in a collapsing dimension/world, attempting to study a space-time rift with a microphone lowered into it. In addition to the strange sounds produced by the rift, a spectrogram reveals two images: a screaming face interpreted by fans as one of Atrus' trapped sons, and the message "H E L P" written in the frequencies.
- In Super Meat Boy Forever, one secret minigame has you wrecking Dr. Fetus's chainsaw mecha, after which he walks on screen and annoyedly tweets "Some teenagers messed up my car." If you plot out the beeps his phone makes as he composes the messsage... he's flipping you the bird, as per usual.
- In Team Fortress 2, one of the sounds produced by the TV involved in the "Tune Merasmus's Multi-Dimensional Television" achievement reveals a clue for how exactly one is even meant to obtain the achievement◊ if put under a spectrogram. As for what the heck the chart means, that is another story.
- In the Terraria Calamity track "1NF3S+@+!0N", if played through an oscilloscope, the breakdown produces images of rotating 3D mushrooms.
- In 'the, the static heard upon entering a level and viewing the "again?" message is actually a spectrogram, reading "start anew where the light vanishes."
- Voices of the Void has a module to see the audio of signals in a spectrogram versus a bars-and-waves visualizer. Most of the time it doesn't reveal any useful information compared to the visual output but one signal in particular spells out "STOP LISTENING IT HEARS US" on the spectrogram.
Web Videos
- Dad has made some use of this, with spectrogram images produced at the end of some videos and songs, hiding clues for the Alternate Reality Game fans, such as an image of a restaurant booth.
- Android 14 from Dragon Ball Z Abridged "talks" in this manner due to a corrupted sound card. The resulting image is always relevant to whatever he's trying to say. For instance, his line "They do not understand our pain" is the famous "Crying Indian" image.
- Drb0sch: Used a few times throughout the latter half of the series. In "nowhere", one spectrogram shows this◊ lovely image of some weird smiley creature, while another shows this◊, which is actually a picture of Howard Hughes exiting a prototype of the "Hughes XF-11" shortly after a successful test flight (image can be seen in full in this article).
- Benn Jordan successfully got a bird to do this.
Web Original
- You know how Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal's soundtrack has images in the spectrograms? Someone on Reddit figured out how to play Doom on a spectrogram.
In-universe examples
Fan Works
- I'm the Only One on Your AM Radio: Radio Man is a conspiracy theorist who talks about robot aliens who secretly disguise themselves as cars and planes, which attracts the attention of the actual Transformers. The second to last broadcast is a half-hour of beeps and screeches, which the viewpoint character runs through a spectrogram. It's the Decepticon logo, next to a barely legible "SOUNDWAVE SUPERIOR".
Films — Live-Action
- In Contact, when the SETI team puts the alien message through a spectrogram, they are disturbed to discover that the resulting image has Nazi imagery in it, the result of the aliens having received a transmission from the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
Web Original
- The "Lavender Town Syndrome" Creepypasta claims that if the theme for Lavender Town is analysed using "special software," the audio produces pictures of Unown which spell out "LEAVE NOW".
