Sonic Visualiser

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Sonic Visualiser
DeveloperCentre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London
Repository
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Written inC++
Engine
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    Operating systemLinux, MacOS, Windows
    TypeAudio analysis
    LicenseGPL-2.0-or-later[1]
    Websitewww.sonicvisualiser.org

    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

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    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

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    Screenshot of the spectrum of the refrain of a pop song (precisely "Più bella cosa" by Eros Ramazzotti): basses, drums and artist's voice can clearly be identified.
    Sonic visualiser melodic range spectrogram example

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

    • generic spectrogram
    • melodic-range spectrogram
    • peak-frequency 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

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    References

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    1. ^ Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
    2. ^ a b c d e f g Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
    3. ^ a b Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
    4. ^ a b c Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
    [edit | edit source]