Waveform

A waveform is the visual plot of an audio signal's amplitude over time — the shape you scrub through in every audio editor.

Waveforms make silence, loud sections and clipping visible at a glance, which is why transcript editors pair text with a waveform for navigation. What they do not show is frequency content — that is the spectrogram's job.

Related terms

AmplitudeAmplitude is the magnitude of an audio signal's oscillation — the physical correlate of loudness, displayed ve… Mel spectrogramA mel spectrogram is the time-frequency picture of audio that speech models actually consume — a spectrogram w… ClippingClipping is the distortion that occurs when a signal exceeds the maximum level a system can represent — the wa…