Sonic Visualiser Explained

Sonic Visualiser
Developer:Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London
Operating System:Linux, MacOS, Windows
Programming Language:C++
Genre:Audio analysis
License:GPL-2.0-or-later[1]

Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files. It is a free software distributed under the GPL-2.0-or-later licence.[2]

History

Sonic Visualiser was developed at the Queen Mary University of London's Centre for Digital Music in 2007. It was written in C++ with Qt and released under the terms of the GNU GPL.[2]

Overview

Sonic Visualiser represents acoustic features of the audio file either as a waveform or as a spectrogram.[3] Spectrogram is a heatmap, where horizontal axis represents time, vertical axis represents frequency, and the colors show presence of frequencies. Sharpness and smoothness of the spectrogram can be configured.[4] There are three types of spectrogram:

Generic spectrogram covers the full frequency range and uses linear frequency scale. Melodic-range spectrogram covers the range which usually contains musical detail. Peak-frequency spectrogram performs phase difference calculations and estimates exact frequencies at each peak cell.[2]

The interface consists of panes and layers. Panes allow to display multiple visualisations simultaneously, and they get aligned in the time axis. A pane can have multiple layers which are used for annotation.[2] The user can configure color schemes for layers, and they can be navigated by clicking the labeled tabs.[4]

There are multiple types of annotation layers which can be edited, including time instants, time-value plots, labels and images. Time instants do not have any associated value, and they can be used to annotate points (e.g. beat locations).[2] Annotations allow the user to clarify relationships between musical parameters.[3]

Sonic Visualiser supports third-party plugins in the Vamp plugin format. The plugins take audio input and parameters and return values for display.[2] There are plugins which compute spectral flux and spectral centroid. Other plugins include automatic melody extraction, beat finding, chord analysis, etc.[4]

Sonic Visualiser is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems.[2]

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Sonic Visualiser license . live. https://web.archive.org/web/20210509202550/https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/download.html . 2021-05-09 .
  2. Book: https://sonicvisualiser.org/sv2010.pdf . Proceedings of the 18th ACM international conference on Multimedia . Chris . Cannam . Christian . Landone . Mark . Sandler . Sonic visualiser: An open source application for viewing, analysing, and annotating music audio files . October 2010 . 1467–1468 . January 18, 2024 . 10.1145/1873951.1874248. 978-1-60558-933-6 .
  3. The improvisatory approach to classical music performance: an empirical investigation into its characteristics and impact . Music Performance Research . David . Dolan . John . Slaboda . Henrik Jeldtoft . Jensen . Bjorn . Cruts . Eugene . Feygelson . 2013 . 6 . January 19, 2024.
  4. Sonic Visualiser: Visualisation, Analysis, and Annotation of Music Audio Recordings . Journal of the American Musicological Society . Marc R. . Thompson . December 1, 2021 . 74 . 3 . 701–714 . 10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.701 . January 20, 2024.