For years, I’ve had students read Mark Katz’s wonderful book, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. About a year ago, I emailed him a visualization I had made to use in my class when we were reading the book, a spectrogram that represents the recorded violin examples. Mark liked it enough to include it in the revised edition (it appears on page 97). The full-color version of the visualization I made is freely available at archive.org.

I’m glad to be even a minuscule part of the book, and won’t deny getting a little lift in my step when I was thanked in the introduction alongside writers who’ve changed my life: Alex Ross, Jonathan Sterne, Anthony Tommasini and others.