Sonic Visualiser is an application for inspecting, analysing and annotating music and other audio recordings. It provides detailed visual representations of sound, helping researchers and musicians investigate characteristics that can be difficult to distinguish through listening alone.
The software is particularly useful for musicological research, acoustic analysis and studying recorded performances. Users can examine waveforms and spectrograms, mark events within a recording and compare different types of information on a shared timeline.
Sonic Visualiser also supports automated analysis through Vamp plugins. These extend the application with algorithms for extracting musical and acoustic features, allowing results to be examined alongside the original recording.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Load audio recordings in formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg, Opus and MP3.
- Display waveforms with adjustable zoom and time resolution.
- Interactive spectrograms with configurable frequency scales, colour maps and smoothing.
- Frequency scales include linear, logarithmic, Mel and other representations.
- Overlay multiple visualisations, including translucent spectrogram layers.
- Annotate recordings with labelled time points, regions, curves and numeric values.
- Run Vamp feature-extraction plugins for pitch detection, beat tracking and other analyses.
- Import annotation data from text files and MIDI sequences.
- Display musical note information alongside waveform and spectral data.
- Synchronise playback with annotations and analysis results.
- Time-stretch playback while maintaining the correspondence between sound and display.
- Loop selected regions for repeated listening and comparison.
- Export selected audio regions, annotations and visualisations.
- Cross-platform support – runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Website: www.sonicvisualiser.org
Support:
Developer: Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Sonic Visualiser is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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|---|---|
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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