Audio Spectrum

Drop in an audio file and watch its frequencies bloom into a shifting tower of color bars, each one rising and falling in sync with the music. The bass kicks swell at the left, high frequencies flutter at the right, and the whole display redraws itself dozens of times per second using the browser's built-in audio engine — no plugins, no installs.

It's a genuinely satisfying way to see a track you know well. Dense electronic mixes reveal layered mid-range activity that's easy to miss on first listen, while acoustic recordings show just how much empty space lives between instruments. If the visual angle interests you, Spectro approaches the same idea through a scrolling spectrogram powered by WebGL — a natural next step if you want a different read on the same audio data.

Browse more tools like this in the music category. Audio Spectrum works best with a decent pair of headphones and a lossless or high-bitrate file — compressed audio at low bitrates tends to flatten out the upper frequency bands noticeably.