How to plot the frequency spectrum with scipy

Spectrum analysis is the process of determining the frequency domain representation of a time domain signal and most commonly employs the Fourier transform. The Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is used to determine the frequency content of signals and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is an efficient method for calculating the DFT. Scipy implements FFT and in this post we will see a simple example of spectrum analysis:

from numpy import sin, linspace, pi
from pylab import plot, show, title, xlabel, ylabel, subplot
from scipy import fft, arange

def plotSpectrum(y,Fs):
 """
 Plots a Single-Sided Amplitude Spectrum of y(t)
 """
 n = len(y) # length of the signal
 k = arange(n)
 T = n/Fs
 frq = k/T # two sides frequency range
 frq = frq[range(n/2)] # one side frequency range

 Y = fft(y)/n # fft computing and normalization
 Y = Y[range(n/2)]
 
 plot(frq,abs(Y),'r') # plotting the spectrum
 xlabel('Freq (Hz)')
 ylabel('|Y(freq)|')

Fs = 150.0;  # sampling rate
Ts = 1.0/Fs; # sampling interval
t = arange(0,1,Ts) # time vector

ff = 5;   # frequency of the signal
y = sin(2*pi*ff*t)

subplot(2,1,1)
plot(t,y)
xlabel('Time')
ylabel('Amplitude')
subplot(2,1,2)
plotSpectrum(y,Fs)
show()

The program shows the following figure, on top we have a plot of the signal and on the bottom the frequency spectrum.