We know that the height of a waveform tells us the amplitude, or how loud or quiet the sound is. We also know that the horizontal axis of a waveform tells us the duration of the sound, but one thing that cannot be immediately determined from a waveform is the sound's frequency.

However, there is another way to analyze audio that gives you a better understanding of which frequencies are present in a recording, and that's the spectrogram view, sometimes called the spectral frequency display. This is a tool built into Adobe Audition, Audacity, and some other audio software.

In the view, rather than being presented with a waveform, you will see what looks like a heat map, an overview of the audio from which you can determine the volume and different frequencies present in a recording.

Whereas in a waveform view the vertical axis represents the amplitude of the sound, in a...