Visualizing vowels as colored ACF images

Hi HN! In my previous post, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25037784" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25037784</a>, I presented so-called ACF images, where the auto-correlation function of a sound waveform is drawn in polar coordinates. It turned out that ACF images capture a good deal of sound symmetry.<p>This post is a natural extension of that idea. I&#x27;ve been thinking how to introduce colors into ACF images. ACF splits a waveform into a set of pure cosine waves and aligns them together by removing the phase. The idea is to color each cosine wave with the note it corresponds to, so when these waves are aligned, not only the amplitudes of the waves add up, but also their colors.

It somehow reminds me of a sci-fi story (I believe by Ray Bradbury) about Martians being able to &quot;see&quot; sounds and music and the possibility - by injecting a drug - for humans to have the same possibility but only once in a lifetime and for a limited time, I cannot remember the exact title.

&gt; Rougly (sic) speaking, the radial coordinate corresponds to time, the angular coordinate corresponds to frequency and color correponds (sic) to pitch or musical note.<p>Confused since pitch and frequency in my mind are the same thing. I googled around and there is precious little about this that I could find to enlighten me ... uses a pair of FFT&#x27;s or some such.

Neat, they&#x27;re vaguely reminiscent of the heptapods&#x27; written language.