Sonic Visualiser

Dan Leech-Wilkinson looks at melody and rubato in musical performance.

This video was produced by Musicology for the Masses.
Direct link to Vimeo page.

Dan Leech-Wilkinson examines the relationship between rubato and loudness in musical performance.

This video was produced by Musicology for the Masses.
Direct link to Vimeo page.

Dan Leech-Wilkinson explains annotation of a bar/beat hierarchy.

This video was produced by Musicology for the Masses.
Direct link to Vimeo page.

Dan Stowell looks at temperament in harpsichord recordings, using Sonic Visualiser and the TempEst plugin.

Direct link to YouTube page.

Matthias Mauch shows how to install Sonic Visualiser and a Vamp plugin and then demonstrates an automatic chord transcription.

Direct link to Vimeo page.

Matthias Mauch from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London talks us through a simple example of labelling a song excerpt with chords in Sonic Visualiser.

Chord labelling can be useful for musicological purposes, or as a reference transcription to test automatic chord labelling algorithms. Or just for music-loving fun.

Direct link to Vimeo page.

Matthias Mauch from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London talks us through a simple example of loading an audio file and some associated data into Sonic Visualiser and looking at the results.

This example is drawn directly from Matthias's everyday use in research on audio chord transcription. Note that the data shown here was calculated by a separate program and is simply loaded (from text files) for inspection in SV, rather than being calculated within the application. For information about the chord transcription and segmentation methods, see Matthias's research.

Direct link to Vimeo page.

An example of automatic alignment of audio for the purpose of comparing recordings, using Sonic Visualiser with the MATCH audio alignment plugin. This is an example with three different historical recordings of the same classical work.

The three audio recordings are loaded, and are first played all together (cacophonously, because they have quite different timing), then solo'ed but unaligned. Then we hit the magic Align button which calculates a time-alignment, and play again with alignment, switching between tracks at will while remaining at the same point in the underlying musical score.

Direct link to Vimeo page.

A quick tour (with sound, but no narration) of some of the features of Sonic Visualiser.

The music is Ron Parker's mix of "Cold Duck" played by the Terrace Martin Trio, taken from the tutorial Mastering with JAMin and Ardour.

This video dates from the end of 2006, covering Sonic Visualiser 1.0. Some occasional audio dropouts seem to have appeared during conversion: sorry about that. The video quality wasn't all that great to start with, but this is a nice outline — and the music's good!

Direct link to Vimeo page.