I was wicked bored last Friday night, and so I sat down with all my whistles, recorded their low D’s, and took screen grabs of their spectral representations in an attempt to figure out why I like some whistles more than others. Without further ado, I present the results of my efforts!
http://www.whistleguide.com/freq/
So, go ahead and tear it to bits! 
That’s…I…I’m speechless.
Does that fall under “no news is good news”? 
That is quite possibly the coolest/dorkiest thing I’ve ever witnessed. 
I agree with Dale.
Thanks for that! I’ve often pondered on a slow Friday night what a spectral analysis of my whistles would look like…
Susan
Wow. I don’t know what most of it means, but wow anyway. I expect that’ll be of use, or at least of interest, to quite a few people here…
Looks like a lot of work nicely presented.
Erm… what was it again?
I usually leave my spectral analysis to the professionals
Man, if I had the tools they had…
Ahh, the childhood memories.
I definitely was able to draw some conclusions from this. But…,er,…I forgot what they were. Very neat though!
seriously, though..i’m sure it means something. I just have no idea what.
(I blame my late-70’s mid-80’s movie flashbacks on Dale’s avatar)
That must have been what caused the Board to go down last night. Really cool the way you made slight changes in that skyline. BTW, what skyline is it?
Philo
Well, for me the big take-away was seeing the similarites in the spectra of whistles I like, versus the similarities in the spectra in whistles that my friend likes. He really really likes the burke/generation/susato strains, while I like my Abell/Alba/Seery strains. If you study the spectra for each, you can see similarities.
anywho… I hope people get a laugh out of it at least.
Nicely done.
I thought it was interesting how, on on the Burke, the first overtone was
higher in amplitude than the fundamental. You can almost hear them
distinctly.
I find the region between 4000Hz and 7000Hz especially interesting…
The Clarke Original and SweeTone have a lot of amplitude across this
part of the spectrum, and they sound very breathy in the samples
(as does the Alba Parlour, to some extent). But the whistles with very
distinct peaks in this range (especially the Burke, and – Holy Cow,
look at the Generation!) have a much more solid and pure sounding tone.
(This, of course, is just going by the sound samples.)
Hi cpelsor
Have you thought about doing Fourier analysis on the various waveforms and using that to provide a more direct comparison.
David
I might also suggest running them all through a Hoozenfarkle algorithm, and then graphing the derivative of the Sporkeniter Sum.
It’s a fairly simple process, and proves very effective for comparing their relative Tittlebum values.
(I’m sorry)
…and we believe you…
I would think Fourier Analysis was used to generate those frequency charts in the first place…
Audition uses Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) to graph the results. From there, you can use different types of FFT’s to get different levels of accuracy. I used Blackmann-Harris. From the Audition docs:
“…[T]he Blackmann-Harris window has a broader frequency band, which isn’t as precise, but the sidelobes are very low, making it easier to pick out the major frequency components.”
So there ya have it!
Congratulations!
Regarding your last observation - about sound stability over time - I think a time-frequency transform, like Wavelet, could be useful.