Sound Relief
a recording, printed as a landscape you can read with a hand
A three-dimensional spectrogram. Time runs left to right, pitch runs upward over six octaves, and loudness is height. Nothing is invented in between: no symbol vocabulary to learn, no lookup table — the surface is the measurement. The tile carries its own axes, so it cannot be read upside down — and it carries them in its OUTLINE: notches in the bottom edge for seconds, notches in the left edge for octaves with a double notch at 1 kilohertz, and the origin corner clipped off at 45°. Nothing on the plate is raised except the sound itself, and the edge chamfers up from a thin lip so the tile can be laid in a drawing and read across rather than bumped into. This mapping has not been tested with a blind reader yet: whether a hand reads a spectrogram as the sound it came from is the open question.
Runs entirely in your browser: the microphone and the file stay on this machine, and nothing is uploaded.
Examples, for learning the surface
Method: the clip's first N seconds are spread across the plot's 3.48 in (88.3 mm). Longer clips give each cell more sound to hold, so detail smears; past 20 s the tool stops reading.
Method: the loudest cell stands this tall — 0.16 in (4 mm) — above a 0.08 in (2 mm) plate and everything else is scaled to it, so the tile is relative — two tiles cannot be compared for loudness.
Method: one cell of the spectrogram, 0.08 in (2 mm) of tile. A moving fingertip resolves about 0.04 in (1 mm), so a cell is never smaller than the hand reading it.
Method: 0 leaves a smooth landscape. Otherwise height is quantised into this many levels, each a whole number of 0.008 in (0.2 mm) print layers, so a hand can count levels instead of judging a slope.
44 cells across by 31 up, on a 4.00 in (101.6 mm) by 3.00 in (76.2 mm) plate.
No sound yet
Record a sound, drop in a file, or pick an example. Everything stays in this browser.
The frequency axis is logarithmic, 125 hertz to 8 kilohertz, so an octave is the same distance anywhere up the tile — 0.41 in (10.5 mm) per octave.
Print texture up, no supports, 0.008 in (0.2 mm) layers. The ridges are a landscape, so there is no thin wall to bridge.