Sonic Visualiser

In the second compulsory assignment in MUS2640 Sensing Sound and music, the students were tasked with a foundational exercise in audio analysis: creating spectrograms. Here I summarize how it went. The Assignment The core task was straightforward: Choose two distinct sound recordings. Students selected everything from musical instrument sounds and songs to environmental sounds like thunderstorms, boiling water, and animal calls. Generate visualizations in Sonic Visualiser. For each sound, they created a waveform (showing amplitude over time) and two types of spectrograms (showing frequency content over time). Compare linear and logarithmic scales. One spectrogram had to use a linear frequency axis and the other a logarithmic one. Write a reflection. Students described what they did and what they learned from comparing the sounds and the different visualizations. They were asked to do the exercise in the excellent open-source program Sonic Visualiser, but for those who wanted to do it in Python or MATLAB, that was fine. ...

{.imagelink}Sonic Visualiser from Queen Mary’s is yet another software tool for visualizing audio content. However, there are some features that stand out: Cross-platform: available for OS X, Linux, Windows GPL’ed Native support for aiff, wav, mp3 and ogg (but what about AAC?) Annotations: Support for adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and curves. The annotations can be overlayed on top of waveforms and spectrograms Time-stretch Vamp Plugins is at the core of the Sonic Visualiser, and it seems like they want this to become a standard for non-realtime audio plugins. This seems like a good idea, and it will be interesting to see how this develops. I have just briefly tested it, and it has not crashed yet (which is a good sign). It is not particularly fast on my PowerBook, but at least it is multi-threaded so it doesn’t freeze while doing the analysis. ...