Many moons ago I became quite obsessed with analyzing spectrograms on my computer.

I would load up audio files in Audacity and look at them to see how the audio "looked", as a function of how intense each frequency is over time.

You can even set a track to spectrogram while recording which allowed you to see the sound in real time.

Music also tends to be very beautiful in the spectrogram! And birdsong also. Sometimes I would see a bird first, and only afterwards notice it in my field of hearing.

I noticed while analyzing a podcast that I began to recognize common words like "you." I also noticed that I was able to easily distinguish between different people's voices.

I had to wonder if I were deaf, or if I become deaf, I would suddenly have a strong motivation to learn how to read these things. To develop some kind of device which would show them to me 24 hours a day.

I have not done this, but the project has remained in the back of my mind for over a decade.

Does anyone else know more about this? Does such a device exist?

I think that only some linguists learn how to read spectrograms. But it seems like something that might be extremely useful to any hearing impaired person?

Relating to the article, I think one could quickly learn to read them fluently (e.g. as subtitles, perhaps overlaid on real life), and of course you get the tonal information built in for free—that's what a spectrogram is!