SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude.

Something which closely resembles the original input sound (a resynthesis) can be generated by computing and adding all of the individual time varying sinusoidal waves together. In almost all cases the resynthesis will not be exactly identical to the original sound (although it is possible to get very close).

Aside from offering a very detailed analysis of the time varying frequency content of a sound, a sinusoidal model offers a great deal of flexibility for editing and manipulation. SPEAR supports flexible selection and immediate manipulation of analysis data, cut and paste, and unlimited undo/redo. Hundreds of simultaneous partials can be synthesized in real-time and documents may contain thousands of individual partials dispersed in time. SPEAR also supports a variety of standard file formats for the import and export of analysis data.

New in v0.7.3

• Support for Unicode filenames/pathnames. This fixes the long standing problem with pathnames containing non-ASCII characters.
• Reorganized and streamlined synthesis options in the Sound menu. Choose various options under the "Synthesis Method" submenu.
• Reorganized synthesis preferences.
• Preferences for controlling noise resynthesis. The noise bandwidth and filter order can be adjusted. High filter orders will produce a noise band with a steeper amplitude cutoff slope.
• Adjustments to the scaling effect of the noise slider.
• Windows bug fixes.