• Registered: 2010-11-01
  • Posts: 6

Topic: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

Hi everyone,

mekidsmom asked me to post a little bit about Chordino and Sonic Visualiser. It's a software that Chris Cannam, a colleague of mine at Queen Mary University of London, has developed.

The Sonic Visualiser program was designed so that researchers who look into the automatic analysis of musical audio (e.g. myself) have a tool to see how well they are doing, and for musicologists and all others to be able to look at different aspects of an audio recording (spectrum, beats, ...), make annotations and play back annotations. The software is stable, free, open source, and you can download compiled binaries from the Sonic Visualier website (http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/). But it is NOT an audio editor smile

One of the cool things of Sonic Visualiser is that it can connect to so called "Vamp" audio analysis plugins. There's a growing arsenal of those to be found on the http://www.vamp-plugins.org/ website: tempo estimators, beat-trackers, segmenters, onset detectors, and many more weird or not so weird ones. By the way, the audio editor Audacity is also a "Vamp host", i.e. it can also make use of these plugins.

---> What makes Sonic Visualiser (and any Vamp host) relevant to this forum is the addition of the new Vamp plugin for chord extraction: "Chordino" (http://www.isophonics.net/nnls-chroma). It works like this: you load a music file into Sonic Visualiser and run the Chordino plugin (if you have installed it smile ) and you get a decent chord transcription in many cases. No automatic chord transcription is perfect, but Chorino certainly gives you a good idea of the chords for many songs. I worked on this for my PhD, and when Chris asked me if I could release it as a Vamp plugin, I said yes. So that's what we did last week. All of this is sponsored by the UK government (i.e. Chris and I get our money from researching stuff, and not from selling software), so it's all free to download.

So, to summarise:
- you can download the Chordino plugin for chord transcription from http://www.isophonics.net/nnls-chroma
- you can download Sonic Visualiser from http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/ and also find lots more information.
- you can download lots more Vamp plugins from http://www.vamp-plugins.org/
- they are all absolutely free.
- installation guidelines can be found in a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojtkaoV0N48&hd=1
- a Chordino example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bditeyrH56M&hd=1

Reviews of SV ... I don't know, it's had a pretty academic following so far, but it's easy to use, so even musicology researchers like it. Maybe the best review is that it is being used by lots of different people: http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q="sonic+visualiser"
If you prefer you can use Chordino with Audacity 1.3.12 (not with 1.2.x) and there are lots of reviews of Audacity, I believe, and loads of videos: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q … y&aq=f

All the best!
Matthias

  • Registered: 2010-11-01
  • Posts: 6

Re: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

oh, I forgot: there are also some nice videos on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/videos/search:sonic%20 … r/cdfa86c6

  • From: Stockton-on-Tees UK
  • Registered: 2010-07-22
  • Posts: 146

Re: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

Hi tausend have tried this with Audacity and when the Chordino plugin completes it continually causes Audacity to crash with an error.

Ian

All things good to know are difficult to learn.
Greek Proverb

4 Reply by tausend (edited by tausend 2010-11-01 14:59:02)

  • Registered: 2010-11-01
  • Posts: 6

Re: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

Oh dear, that's a shame. It's running ok for us. Now, what to do:
- if you're dedicated, please tell us what OS you used, and what version of Audacity. Also a detailed error message would be cool. Can you send this to matthiasmauch ät yahoo döt de, that'd be awesome.
- you can also leave it to us to figure out ourselves, but it will probably take longer to solve the problem .. depends how keen you are smile

---> update: this problem seems to be related to older processors, we're working on it! For most of you it should work fine even now.

Thanks!
Matthias

  • From: Stockton-on-Tees UK
  • Registered: 2010-07-22
  • Posts: 146

Re: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

Hi all

I'd just like to thank Matthias and his colleague Chris for their speedy responses to and diagnosis of my problems with the plugin.  If it works as well as advertised I am looking forward to the revised version so that I can use it.

Ian

All things good to know are difficult to learn.
Greek Proverb
  • From: NY
  • Registered: 2009-08-26
  • Posts: 4,320

Re: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

Thank you very much Matthias for the detailed description of this free general license software!  Because it primarily relates to looking up the chords to a specific song I will leave it here in the song requests section for now... although because there is so much more to it, we may end up moving this to another location within the forum for people to find it better down the road. 

I think your friend was near genius for suggesting vamp a plug in be made for Chordino.... and both of you quite "crafty" for creating all of this.  A project for your PhD?  What is your PhD in?  Did you complete?  Shall we call you Dr. Matthias?  CONGRATULATIONS!  And even better... someone else paid for it all!  smile  I will be checking out this program and the plug in for sure!  It looks like windows 7 or mac is being used in the videos... I'm still running XP, do you think this will be an issue?  I do have the day off today and time to "play", so I'll let you know how I fare!

Amy

Art and beauty are in the eyes of the beholder.
What constitutes excellent music is in the ears of the listener.

mekidsmom's Website

  • From: Stockton-on-Tees UK
  • Registered: 2010-07-22
  • Posts: 146

Re: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

Hi all

These guys are brilliant as they have made it compatible with older processors (like mine) and now and it works brilliantly.  I have asked Matthias to consider an installation instruction video for Windows as the one shown above is for Mac.

Ian

All things good to know are difficult to learn.
Greek Proverb
  • Registered: 2010-11-01
  • Posts: 6

Re: Sonic Visualiser software / chord transcription plugin

Hi,

@ Ian: I'm glad you're happy with our work. The more brilliant guy is Chris Cannam though, really. I will keep you posted about new videos I make. In the meantime, the Vamp plugins website already describes the (very easy) installation procedure for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. http://www.vamp-plugins.org/download.html#install

@ Amy: I think Sonic Visualiser and Chordino should run on XP too. Give us a shout if it doesn't. Re my PhD: its subject is actually automatic chord transcription (in electronic engineering), which may be hard to believe; I'm so glad I stumbled across that research field. Incidentally, no-one calls me Dr Matthias (though it would be kinda cool). smile Checkout my website if you want to know more: http://matthiasmauch.net
One thing that's bad about academic research is that you normally don't live to see someone use your stuff, so I'm really happy that I could make this happen, and yes, my friend is "near genius"!

Well, I don't really have to say much more right now. Have a nice day all of you!
Matthias