Sonic Visualiser

About this resource

Sonic Visualiser is free, open-source software for visualisation, analysis and annotation of music recordings on Windows, Linux and Mac. The project was initiated and developed at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London. Its stated audience includes musicologists, archivists and signal-processing researchers, alongside anyone who wants to inspect what is inside an audio file. ^[1]

The application loads recordings, displays waveforms and spectrograms, and supports labelled time points, segments, values and curves. Annotation layers can be overlaid with aligned scales or displayed at multiple time resolutions. Feature-extraction plugins add analyses such as beat tracking and pitch detection; MIDI note data can be imported and viewed alongside the recording. These functions organise evidence within a recording rather than replacing a conventional recording or mixing workstation. ^[2]

Playback can be looped around selected passages and time-stretched while retaining a synchronised display. Audio regions and annotations can be exported. The project also distinguishes related applications: Sonic Lineup compares versions of the same source, Tony focuses on pitch/note transcription, and Sonic Annotator performs command-line batch feature extraction. Those boundaries are a useful first stop when choosing between interactive inspection, comparison and automated processing. ^{[1] [2]}