Audio (WAV) visualization

Greetings,

I'm hoping to use an electret mic along with an Arduino Uno to capture audio (hopefully in WAV) format, and then assign a color output based on specified ranges of frequency in order to visualize a conversation. My question is, can I use the Arduino with the mic alone to get the type of signal that I need, or do I need something like the WAVE shield from Adafruit (Adafruit Wave Shield for Arduino Kit [v1.1] : ID 94 : $22.00 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits ) to pass the signal through to get the desired effect?

A bit new to the Arduino, but hoping that it can be a tool for my creative work.

Any help is appreciated.

I seem to remember seeing an Arduino-based graphic equalizer, perhaps in the playground?

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,63275.0.html

http://interface.khm.de/index.php/lab/experiments/frequency-measurement-library/

Ran across this... and to my newbie eyes, it looks like something I could use.

I'm only after conversation range, does it appear to more well trained eyes that I could limit the frequency measured with some additional code. I'm after conversational frequency range, (200Hz to 5,000Hz), so I assume by limiting the range, I can ease the processing done by the hardware...

-Learning as I go!

All that will do is to masure a single frequency.
Get a scope and look at the waveform for a conversation. It is a mish mash of frequencies. This thing is far more complex than you imagin at the moment.
Basically you need to look at doing what is called an FFT of the incoming signal to give you a graph of all the frequencies present. However this will not give you anything useful in the form of being able to distinguish anything about the conversation but it might look pretty.

I seem to remember seeing an Arduino-based graphic equalizer,

Did you mean spectrum analyser?

Color Organ

MSGEQ7 chip
http://www.cmiyc.com/projects/msgeq7-simple-spectrum-analyzer/

FFT Library
http://fftarduino.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/color-organ-spectrum-analyzer-on.html

The input here has given me a good place to start. Thank you all for replying! The commitment to this platform and community show me that I'm in the right place.