A Comparison of Saxophone Sounds

All these saxophone sounds are the same note played on the same instrument with the same reed by the same player (a professional) but played in different ways. Click on the sound to hear the sound as recorded (wav files). For best results, use a computer with a good sound system.

The waveform shown is the waveform after the relative phases of the components of the fourier series have been set to zero. Click on the small picture in the table for a larger version. You cannot hear phase differences for sustained tones however the relative phases change what the waveform looks like (see here for more info). Hence, two very different looking waveforms can actually produce the same sound. So to provide a fair comparison related to how it sounds, the relative phases have been put on an equal footing.

The spectra shown were computed by extracting data from the middle of the sound file (to avoid the attack and decay), applying a Hamming window, a fast fourier transform, and then converting that output to dB, with the maximum scaled to 0 dB for all. Click on the small figure to see a larger version.

Sound File (.wav)	Normalized Waveform	Spectrum
Sound A
Sound B
Sound C
Sound D
Sound E
Sound F
Sound G
Sound H
Sound I
Sound J
Sound K
Sound L
Sound M