Sonic Visualiser
Audio analyser software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.[3]
| Sonic Visualiser | |
|---|---|
| |
| Developer | Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London |
| Stable release | 5.2[1]
/ 7 March 2025 |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Linux, MacOS, Windows |
| Type | Audio analysis |
| License | GPL-2.0-or-later[2] |
| Website | www |
| Repository | |
History
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.[3]
Overview
![](#/media/File:Sonic_Visualizer_-_"Più_bella_cosa"_by_Eros_Ramazzotti.png)
Sonic Visualiser represents acoustic features of the audio file either as a waveform or as a spectrogram.[4] 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.[5] 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.[3]
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.[3] The user can configure color schemes for layers, and they can be navigated by clicking the labeled tabs.[5]
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).[3] Annotations allow the user to clarify relationships between musical parameters.[4]
Sonic Visualiser supports third-party plugins in the Vamp plugin format. The plugins take audio input and parameters and return values for display.[3] There are plugins which compute spectral flux and spectral centroid. Other plugins include automatic melody extraction, beat finding, chord analysis, etc.[5]
Sonic Visualiser is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems.[3]