I want to very roughly match timbres of a user input with a reference. Is there a way to compare spectra of sounds in pd, to a variable degree, and output something like a true or false if they do or do not match?

Thanks,

You can try and look into fiddle~

"The Fiddle object estimates the pitch and amplitude of an incoming sound, both continuously and as a stream of discrete "note" events. Fiddle optionally outputs a list of detected sinusoidal peaks used to make the pitch determination."

fiddle will analyse your incoming sound and output several data. Arguments are window size, number of pitch outlets, number of pitch to find and number of peaks to output. Then you can make logical comparison with ==

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