Is there any general-purpose form of short-time Fourier transform with corresponding inverse transform built into SciPy or NumPy or whatever?
There\'s the pyplot
I think scipy.signal has what you are looking for. It has reasonable defaults, supports multiple window types, etc...
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy-0.17.0/reference/generated/scipy.signal.spectrogram.html
from scipy.signal import spectrogram freq, time, Spec = spectrogram(signal)