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Spectrogram Spectacle - TV Tropes

  • ️Thu Mar 20 2025

Spectrogram Spectacle (trope)

Why flip you off while typing when he can flip you off with the sound of his typing?

A spectrogram is a way of visualizing audio where sounds are mapped out depending on their pitch. High-pitch sounds go higher on the spectrogram, low-pitch sounds go lower. This has led to many audio wizzes deciding to repurpose audio as a visual medium, commonly as an Easter Egg. Next time you hear some strange fuzzy noise, or a series of seemingly disconnected beeps, consider whether it's really just that...

Examples:

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Anime & Manga 

  • Chainsaw Man: In the last scene (Stinger not included) of the last episode of Season 1 of the anime, there's a noise as the door Pochita's behind moves away from Denji in his dream. The resulting image is a horrifyingly warped image of Makima, sporting a grin that splits her face in half, representing how this was the moment she figured out how to break Denji's contract with Pochita.

Live-Action TV 

  • Mr. Robot: Season 2, Episode 5 opens with five seconds of garbled static. The spectrogram of this static forms the famous "Hang in there, Baby!" motivational poster. This same poster is later seen when Angela is being initiated by Whiterose in the finale.

Music 

Video Games 

  • Responsible of C418, Minecraft's incredibly creepy "11" music disc has some noise at the end, which features drawings of what appear to be the default player's face and C418's autograph. There's also a creeper face hidden in a seemingly innocent random ambiance file.
  • In Super Meat Boy Forever, one secret minigame has you wrecking Dr. Fetus's chainsaw mecha, after which he walks on screen and annoyedly tweets "Some teenagers messed up my car." If you plot out the beeps his phone makes as he composes the messsage... he's flipping you the bird, as per usual.
  • Doom:
  • A Cuphead easter egg, long thought to be Copy Protection, involves replacing the title screen theme with its demonic-sounding version, which shows the Devil's sprites in his boss fight when inspected with a spectrogram.
  • In the Terraria Calamity track "1NF3S+@+!0N", if played through an oscilloscope, the breakdown produces images of rotating 3D mushrooms.
  • In 'the, the static heard upon entering a level and viewing the "again?" message is actually a spectrogram, reading "start anew where the light vanishes."
  • In Team Fortress 2, one of the sounds produced by the TV involved in the "Tune Merasmus's Multi-Dimensional Television" achievement reveals a clue for how exactly one is even meant to obtain the achievement◊ if put under a spectrogram. As for what the heck the chart means, that is another story.
  • Myst: A vinyl-record release for the soundtrack in 2022 has a special bonus track recorded ostensibly by the real-life Atrusnote , where he is in a collapsing dimension/world, attempting to study a space-time rift with a microphone lowered into it. In addition to the strange sounds produced by the rift, a spectrogram reveals two images: a screaming face interpreted by fans as one of Atrus' trapped sons, and the message "H E L P" written in the frequencies.
  • Voices of the Void has a module to see the audio of signals in a spectrogram versus a bars-and-waves visualizer. Most of the time it doesn't reveal any useful information compared to the visual output but one signal in particular spells out "STOP LISTENING IT HEARS US" on the spectrogram.

Web Videos 

  • Dad has made some use of this, with spectrogram images produced at the end of some videos and songs, hiding clues for the Alternate Reality Game fans, such as an image of a restaurant booth.
  • Android 14 from Dragon Ball Z Abridged "talks" in this manner due to a corrupted sound card. The resulting image is always relevant to whatever he's trying to say. For instance, his line "They do not understand our pain" is the famous "Crying Indian" image.

In-universe examples

Films — Live-Action

  • In Contact, when the SETI team puts the alien message through a spectrogram, they are disturbed to discover that the resulting image has Nazi imagery in it, the result of the aliens having received a transmission from the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

Web Original