My partner’s doing some speech analysis stuff, and introduced me to sox, a self-described “Swiss Army Knife of sound processing.” I was goofing with it today to convert spectrograms of mp3s to animated GIFs. This is quick and very dirty, but should work.

Requirements

On Ubuntu, install sox, the mp3 plug-in for sox, and imagemagick:

sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-mp3 imagemagick

Running

1. Copy the text of this script into a file:

    #!/bin/bash
    # Get input file
    audiofile=$1
    if [ -z $1 ]; then
      echo "No mp3 file provided. Use ./makemeasammich /path/to/mymp3.mp3"
      exit 1;
    fi
     # Get seconds in audio file
     s=`sox "$audiofile" -n stat 2>&1 |grep Length |awk '{print $3}'`
     seconds=`echo $s/1 |bc`
     echo $audiofile is $seconds seconds long
     slice=0
     while [ $slice -lt $seconds ]
      do
       echo "Processing seconds starting at: $slice"
       sox "$audiofile" -n remix -r trim $slice spectrogram
       mv spectrogram.png $slice.png
       slice=`expr $slice + 9`
      done
    for i in `ls *.png`; do
      convert $i $i.gif;
    done;
    # use colors 32 to compress a bit
    convert -colors 32 -delay 100 -loop 1 *.gif $audiofile_animated.gif
   

2. Run the script like so:

sh makemeasammich.sh /home/jen/mysong.mp3

And you should get something like the following, except it’ll be larger and animated:


You can change the convert line to change animation/looping settings; removing “colors -32” will give you better quality (much larger filesize).