Spectrograms are a convenient way to visualize the data/algorithm but are rarely part of the actual analysis. They are already using the 2d array so to speak. In any case a spectrogram is just a 2d array where the magnitude of each array element is mapped to a color, so its effectively the same thing. Few if any people use visual representations of sound for analysis, except for the crazies who run spectrograms though visual deep learning networks.