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Getting a handle on the problem

The first question that came to mind, of course, was how does solo music differ from non-solo music?  Let's take a look at a spectrogram of a short section of music.  You can listen to this sample here.  The solo section, which I have hand labeled, is between the thick black lines.  I clipped the spectrogram at 4000 Hz because 0-4000 Hz is where the interesting stuff takes place.

Spectrogram with solo section labeled.

As you can see, the solo and non-solo sections look quite different.  The solo music is much more sparse because there is only one pitch at any given time.  The frequencies that register are the pitch, twice the pitch, three times the pitch, etc.  When the orchestra is playing, in contrast, there are many different pitches.  The spectrogram is much more dense.

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Christine Smit

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