Sonic Visualiser

Sonic Visualiser is an open‑source application for Windows, Linux, and macOS that lets users view and analyze the internal structure of music audio files. It provides highly configurable visualisations of waveforms, spectrograms, and other signal representations, and supports annotation layers that can be edited and saved alongside the audio. The tool is aimed at musicologists, archivists, signal‑processing researchers, and anyone needing a detailed, graphical view of a recording’s contents.

The program includes a plugin architecture for extending analysis capabilities, allowing users to apply custom feature extraction or processing modules. It also offers precise time‑aligned annotation tools for marking events, notes, or other musical phenomena directly on the visualisations. Documentation, tutorials, and example data are provided to help users get started with common tasks such as pitch tracking, tempo estimation, and spectral analysis.

Sonic Visualiser is part of a family of related tools, including Sonic Lineup for comparing multiple performances, Tony for high‑quality pitch transcription of solo vocals, and Sonic Annotator for batch feature extraction via the same plugin system. The software is released under a stable, mature version and is freely available for academic and non‑commercial use.