Development [LWN.net]

Analyze audio with Sonic Visualiser

Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing audio files, designed by Chris Cannam at the Queen Mary University of London Centre for Digital Music. Sonic Visualizer's target audience is people in the field of music production:

The aim of Sonic Visualiser is to be the program you reach for when you find a musical recording you want to study rather than simply hear. As well as a number of features designed to make exploring audio data as revealing and fun as possible, Sonic Visualiser also has powerful annotation capabilities to help you to describe what you find, and the ability to run automated annotation and analysis plugins in the new Vamp analysis plugin format. We hope Sonic Visualiser will be of particular interest to musicologists, archivists, signal-processing researchers and anyone else looking for a friendly way to take a look at what lies inside the audio file.

Sonic Visualiser's feature list includes:

Support for WAV, Ogg and MP3 formatted audio files.
Designed to work with the JACK Audio Connection Kit.
The ability to play audio files with realtime visualization.
Display of time-series audio data.
Display of audio spectrum data.
Display of basic, melodic range and peak frequency spectrograms.
Interactive control knobs for changing display height and time windows.
The ability to overlay annotations for comparison purposes.
Support for loading external annotation data.
Support for adding labels to audio segments.
Support for loading, displaying and playing of MIDI file note data.
Support for feature-extraction plugins such as beat and pitch detectors.
The ability to play audio back at different speeds.
The ability to extract regions of audio to external files.
Support for large audio files.

See the reference manual and other documentation for a more complete description of Sonic Visualiser's capabilities.

Your author tried running the precompiled binary on a 1.8 Ghz Athlon system with an M-Audio Delta 44 four channel sound card. The system was running the Ubuntu Edgy Eft distribution with JACK installed and running at 44.1Khz. The software worked fine with the basic time series display, but sound playback started to drop out when the more demanding spectrogram displays were enabled. The system was not able to fully compute the spectrum display while the music played. A faster and more finely tuned machine would probably help.

The user interface did not take long to figure out, the waveform display was easy to navigate around and the amplitude and time span knobs were fun to play around with. When viewing the spectrum analysis display, a few minor changes to the controls quickly caused the application to became unresponsive while it cranked on the data.

A .wav file with Roger Waters playing the song "Shine on you Crazy Diamond" was viewed. Interestingly, it was possible to see the individual guitar notes, drum beats, singing and other components of the music in the spectrogram display. When real-time playback was stopped, the machine was able to crank on the audio data and produce a more complete view of the spectral data.

Version 1.0 pre3 of Sonic Visualiser was announced on March 19, 2007: "Announcing the release of Sonic Visualiser 1.0pre3, a pre-release for the soon forthcoming Sonic Visualiser 1.0." If you want to try the code out, source code and precompiled binaries are available for download here.

Comments (2 posted)

System Applications

Audio Projects

JACK 0.103.0 released

Version 0.103.0 of JACK, the JACK Audio Connection Kit, is out with numerous bug fixes. "JACK is a low-latency audio server, written for POSIX conformant operating systems such as GNU/Linux and Apple's OS X. It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves."