How a Minecraft Mystery Led to a Python Experiment

A Father / Son journey in to the Creeper’s Secret Spectrogram

Michael Berry
4 min readAug 18, 2023

One of the cool things about having a child is getting the chance to rediscover the wonderment of coding all over again!

Today my Son came to me and said: “Dad, do you know what a spectrogram is?”

In reply I proceeded to describe a spectrograph used for measuring the properties of light (as opposed to spectrogram which is a visual representation of frequencies).

Him: “Can that also be used for sound?”

We turned to google and quickly discovered my error.

Me: “Well there you go we’ve learned something, why do you ask?”

Him: “I heard that in Minecraft, there is a sound file called Cave14.ogg that shows the face of a creeper in the spectrogram, the sound designer put it in on purpose.”

Creeper in Minecraft vs Spectrogram

My Son was blown away by the idea and prospect of spectrograms, and so I said: “You know what, I recon this will be super easy to do in Python, let’s give it a go.”

So we broke out ChatGPT, Prompt: “can you please give me some python code that will ingest a local .ogg file and produce a…

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