sonicvisual

SonicVisual, commonly known as Sonic Visualiser, is a free, open-source software application for viewing and analyzing the contents of music audio files. It aims to provide researchers, educators, and audio engineers with a platform to inspect signal structure and annotate audio data. The program offers multiple visualization modes, including waveform and spectrogram views, as well as derived representations such as pitch tracks, chroma features, and tempo estimates. Users can create and manage time-aligned annotation layers to mark events, segments, or notes, and can display data produced by external analysis plugins.

SonicVisual supports plugin architectures via Vamp, enabling feature extractors such as pitch detection, onsets, and MFCCs to be computed and overlaid on the visualizations. The software reads common audio formats through platform libraries and is designed to be cross-platform, running on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is written in Java and uses a modular, extensible architecture consistent with other research tools.

The project originated at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London and has been developed and maintained as an open-source project since the mid-2000s. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License, reflecting its community-oriented development model. SonicVisual is widely used in academic contexts for musicology research, signal processing education, and audio analysis workflows. See also: Sonic Visualiser, Vamp plugin architecture, audio analysis tools.