We discuss the Berezin transform, a Markov operator associated to positive operator valued measures (POVMs), in a number of contexts including the Berezin–Toeplitz quantization, Donaldson’s dynamical system on the space of Hermitian inner products on a complex vector space, representations of finite groups, and quantum noise. In particular, we calculate the spectral gap for quantization in terms of the fundamental tone of the phase space. Our results confirm a prediction of Donaldson for the spectrum of the Q -operator on Kähler manifolds with constant scalar curvature, and yield exponential convergence of Donaldson’s iterations to the fixed point. Furthermore, viewing POVMs as data clouds, we study their spectral features via geometry of measure metric spaces and the diffusion distance.