# Visualizing power spectra: plotspectrum

### 15.1.10 Visualizing power spectra: plotspectrum

The plotspectrum command displays the power spectrum of an audio clip.

- plotspectrum takes one mandatory and one optional argument:
  - A, an audio clip.
  - Optionally, range, which can be in the form range=[lf,uf] or range=lf..uf, where lf is the lower bound and uf the upper bound of the desired frequency band (by default, range=[0,s/2] where s is the sampling rate).
- plotspectrum(A ⟨range⟩) displays the power spectrum of the audio data on the specified frequency range.
  If the audio clip has more than one channel, the channels are mixed down to a single channel before computing the spectrum.

#### Example.

Assuming that a male voice is recorded in the file example1.wav:
Input:

clip:=readwav("/path/to/sounds/example1.wav"):;
plotspectrum(clip,range=[0,1500])

Output:

You can see that the dominant frequency is around 220 Hz, which is the middle of tenor range. This is consistent with the fact that a male is speaking in the clip.