I am teaching a course in sound theory this semester, and therefore thought it was time to update a little program I developed several years ago, called SoundAnalysis. While there are many excellent sound analysis programs out there (SonicVisualiser, Praat, etc.), they all work on pre-recorded sound material. That is certainly the best approach to sound analysis, but it is not ideal in a pedagogical setting where you want to explain things in realtime.
There are not so many realtime audio analysis programs around, at least not anyone that looks and behaves similar on both OSX and Windows. One exception that is worth mentioning is the excellent sound tools from Princeton, but they lack some of the analysis features I am interested in showing to the students.
So my update of the SoundAnalysis program, should hopefully cover a blank spot in the area of realtime sound visualisation and analysis. The new version provides a larger spectrogram view, and the option to change various spectrogram features on the fly. The quantitative features have been moved to a separate window, and now also includes simple beat tracking.
Below is a screenshot giving an overview of the new version:
Other new selling points include a brand new name… I have also decided to rename it to AudioAnalysis, so that it harmonizes with my AudioVideoAnalysis and VideoAnalysis programs.
The program can be found over on the fourMs software page, and here is a short tutorial video:
Please let me know if you find bugs or other strange things in the program, and I will try to fix them as soon as possible (I expect there to be some Win 64-bit issues…).