[linux-audio-dev] ANNOUNCE: Sonic Visualiser and Vamp plugin SDK 1.0pre3 released

[Chris Cannam]

On Tuesday 20 Mar 2007 00:41, Paul Winkler wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 11:28:40PM +0000, Chris Cannam wrote:
> > Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the
> > contents of music audio files.  It contains advanced waveform and
> > spectrogram viewers, as well as editors for many sorts of audio
> > annotations.
>
> What does "annotations" mean in this context?

That's a good question.

In principle it means pretty much any observation about the contents or 
context of the audio.  Common examples relevant to the current Sonic 
Visualiser might be the locations of beats and bar lines in a 
performance with rubato; the extents of a particular structural segment 
of the music (the chorus, for example); textual labels such as lyrics 
or comments about the music; or symbolic note information like MIDI 
that is associated with a particular feature in the audio.  SV handles 
all of those tolerably well, and has unusually good support for 
mingling user annotations with machine-generated annotations from 
plugins like beat trackers.  It doesn't currently handle contextual 
metadata not associated with particular moments in the audio, like 
biographical information, collection tags like genre etc which can also 
be considered annotations.

As one example of why anyone would be interested in annotating bits of 
an audio file by hand, have a look at the musicological tutorial from 
the CHARM project at

http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/svtraining/analysing_recordings.html

(This tutorial uses SV 0.9, and some of the things it does would be 
simpler with the 1.0pre version.)

You can also use SV for little jobs like beat slicing (run a beat 
detection plugin, click-select beats, export as audio), practising your 
Chinese tones by comparing the spectral shape of your voice with the 
guys on ChinesePod, slowing down and looping non-contiguous bits of 
audio to compare one riff with another version later in the song, etc.


Chris