![]() On the keyboard hit the "G" key, which is a short cut to the "Pane>Add Spectrogram" menu item. Your audio file will remain loaded, but we're going to view it in a different form, as a spectrogram. This adds little value to our exercise so click the 'X' in the upper left corner to close that spectrum window. ![]() The file will open in SV's default view, the well known spectrum image. In the resulting window navigate to the file you wish to listen to, select it, and click Open. Go to the File menu and select the "Import Audio File" option. Choose something short for these exercises, just till you get the hang of things. Once Sonic Visualser (SV for short) is installed, you'll want to start it and then open your first audio file. Older computers will work as well, but with diminishing performance as age increases (hmmm, sounds familiar). You don't need anything super powerful to run this, but a computer bought within the last couple of years will give you the most satisfactory graphics performance (this is a visual application after all). So enough hyperbole, let's get to it.īegin by downloading Sonic Visualiser from the download page at the link above and installing it on your computer. With spectrograms you'll not only be able to scroll through hours of "visual" audio in much less time than it takes to play it, you'll actually begin to recognize patterns that tell you what kind of sound you've captured, before you even listen to it. Your time is better spent examining the sounds you've captured, and this tool will help you find the sounds you would never have known were there. Why do this? Because listening to hours of field recordings on the off chance that something catches your ear has become a pitiful activity. And because I believe this tool can fundamentally change the way you will look at your field recordings, I'm willing to write this direct "how-to" to help you get up and productive with this software as quickly as possible. But the value of this type of tool, even for the simple act or reviewing your audio recordings, is so immense that I found it well worth the effort. The thing that makes Sonic Visualiser so appealing to me, its capability, also created a learning curve that took me a few weeks to work through. And the the price is certainly nothing to sneeze at. ![]() Sonic Visualiser ( ) is one of a collection of audio applications capable of generating spectrograms, but in terms of capability and configurability, it's very hard to beat. So to "visualize" the sounds captured in an audio recording I looked into spectrograms, and found a free, open source application with audio analysis at its core. The second thing I found was that your ears work better when your eyes are involved. I found that with some judicious post processing, as described in this post, I could clean up a lot of noisy recordings and uncover previously obscured or inaudible sounds. The first thing I learned was some new tricks from an old friend, Audacity. So I set about finding tools that could help me take a closer listen to, and look at, some of these recordings. And while I have a fairly practiced ear when it comes to audio analysis, I had a sneaking suspicion there is more to these recordings than normally meets the ear. Last year I began paying a lot of attention to the various audio recordings of potential sasquatch vocalizations that are available on the internet. ![]()
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