~ Seminar - Research on Music History and Analysis

» By Joren on Friday 26 November 2010

This post contains links to genuinely useful software to do signal based audio analysis.

Sonic Visualizer: As its name suggests Sonic Visualizer contains a lot different visualisations for audio. It can be used for analysis (pitch,beat,chroma,…) with VAMP-plugins. To quote “The aim of Sonic Visualiser is to be the first program you reach for when want to study a musical recording rather than simply listen to it”. It is the swiss army knife of audio analysis.
BeatRoot is designed specifically for one goal: beat tracking. It can be used for e.g. comparing tempi of different performances of the same piece or to track tempo deviation within one piece.
Tartini is capable to do real-time pitch analysis of sound. You can e.g. play into a microphone with a violin and see the harmonics you produce and adapt you playing style based on visual feedback. It also contains a pitch deviation measuring apparatus to analyse vibrato.
Tarsos is software for tone scale analysis. It is useful to extract tone scales from audio. Different tuning systems can be seen, extracted and compared. It also contains the ability to play along with the original song with a tuned midi keyboard .

Melodic Match is a different beast. It does not work on signal level but processes symbolic audio. More to the point it searches through MusicXML files – which can be created from MIDI-files. See its website for use cases. Melodic Match is only available for Windows.

During a lecture at the University College Gent, Faculty of Music these tools were presented with some examples. The slides and a zip-file with audio samples, slides and software are available for reference. Most of the time was given to Tarsos, the software we developed.

Olmo Cornelis also gave a lecture about his own research and how Tarsos fits in the bigger picture. His presentation and the presentation with audio are also available here.