Spectrum Lab

So as a continuation from last night, I found this fantastic little program called "Spectrum Lab", that takes real time audio information and runs an FFT process on it, in order to generate a colour mapped frequency analyser. Further more, you can adjust the colour spectrum, threshhold points and frequency response, allowing a pretty large range of displays and graph types. Here is a link to the Website, with a couple of screen grab so you get the idea.

Spectrum Lab

 

 If nothing else, this program demonstrates clearly that others have had similar thought processes (and have been capable of actually making them happen). It is also going to be invaluable in helping me explain the project to people I may have to consult in future; I can easily convey the ways in which I would ideally change this system in order to do what I want to do in the studio environment. 

I have already touched on the fact Max/MSP can do FFT proccessing along with modernised varients, so the question is now, how can I utilise prexisting Max/MSP objects to recreate a slicker, graphically focused version of what you see above? Also, how can a get it out of the computer Real-Time? As cool as Spectrum Lab is, it is old. Their idea of real-time back then is perhpas not quite what I understand real-time to mean, so streamlining the process would seem to be important.

At this point, I think I can safely say that no matter what path my research leads me down in terms of production, I will be using Ableton as the Hub. There are many reasons behind this. It is the "Musicians DAW" (though a lot of others would lay claim to this, too). It has seemless Max/MSP integration and I can also feed a range of software from it very simply by comparison to others. Finally, it runs on both Mac and PC, though I will be building this project on the Mac side first - there are some objects that only exist on the Mac version of Max/MSP that