

And the the price is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Sonic Visualiser ( ) is one of a collection of audio applications capable of generating spectrograms, but in terms of capability and configurability, it's very hard to beat. So to "visualize" the sounds captured in an audio recording I looked into spectrograms, and found a free, open source application with audio analysis at its core. The second thing I found was that your ears work better when your eyes are involved.


I found that with some judicious post processing, as described in this post, I could clean up a lot of noisy recordings and uncover previously obscured or inaudible sounds. The first thing I learned was some new tricks from an old friend, Audacity. So I set about finding tools that could help me take a closer listen to, and look at, some of these recordings. And while I have a fairly practiced ear when it comes to audio analysis, I had a sneaking suspicion there is more to these recordings than normally meets the ear. There are also other types of layers that are not covered in this quick guide.Įxport the entire spectrogram as an image file: File->Export Image File.Last year I began paying a lot of attention to the various audio recordings of potential sasquatch vocalizations that are available on the internet. Note that you can have multiple time instants layers and multiple text layers, each with different colors. Use the edit tool (the Cartesian-coordinate-shaped tool) to change or move the text box Put a text box on the spectrogram (for example, to label an important element in the spectrogram): Add a new text layer by pressing the key “t”
#Sonic visualiser spectrogram how to#
Show the center line (i.e., show the audio playback position line): Open the “View” drop-down menu->select “Show Centre Line” How to show the center line Annotating the visualizationĬreate a time instant (which appears as a vertical line for example, to delineate a section of an audio file): Put the center line on the desired position on the spectrogramĪdd a “time instant” by pressing semi-colon (“ ”) or by clicking with the pencil tool Make the screen scroll when you hit play: Select layer 1->open the “Follow Playback” drop-down menu->select “Scroll” How to make the screen scroll on playback Zoom in and out on the spectrogram: Up and down arrows Launch Sonic Visualiser, and open the audio file you want to analyze: Cmd-oĪdjust the FFT settings in Sonic Visualiser (the following is a good starting point, change it according to your needs): Window: 8192īins: Log Possible FFT settings in Sonic Visualiser The spectrogram above is from the beginning of Vowel (2008). This is a short guide to get you started quickly with the application. It was developed at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London and is available at.

Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing, analyzing, and annotating audio files.
