I tell a little about what I did with Octave during the last days. This is the first part and it's about creating a video of a modulated Gaussian. The second part is about doing FFT's of time-frequency shifted Gaussians.
I figured out how to merge images into a video stream. I rely on Linux tools rather than trying to do it from within Octave, because I don't know whether libraries for creating videos are somehow available there. However, I wrote an M-file which creates images of a modulated 2D-Gaussian. The 2D-frequency changes by going on a spiral in the complex plane starting from the origin. This yields a modulation which is rotating while the line-pattern gets narrower:
I merged the bunch of 900 images to a video by using MEncoder, the open-source encoder from the MPlayer suite. I did it this way:
$ mencoder mf://out*png -ovc lavc -mf fps=25 -o rotgauss.avi
I know, the usage of a proprietary container format is a contradiction to using open-source tools, but I only want to care about such details later.
I won't publish the M-file here, as it's too basic.