WaveSurfer Review

by Eun Ah Lee

Description

WaveSurfer is a tool for recording, playing, editing, and viewing audio data. It is developed for speech analysis purpose in research by the Center for Speech Technology at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, however, voice recording and basic editing can be used for any everyday purpose. It also has functions to visualize waveform, spectrogram, and other data plots. Therefore, it is useful for sound visualization purpose. It can show basic statistic data which may be used for converting or selecting audio files for special purpose.

WaveSurfer works for both Window PC and MAC OS X, and the default format for input and output file is wav format.   

Access

WaveSurfer is free and can be found at http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/

Sample Usage

Tips, tricks, and tutorials

WaveSurfer user manual can be found here.

http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/man.html

What the Tool Does Well

WaveSurfer works well to visualize the sound data. The sound file can be loaded or a new sound can be recorded, and the whole data or a part of it can be visualized using the editing function. The data visualization includes a waveform that shows amplitude, a spectrogram that shows frequencies, pitch plot, power graph, and formant graph. All the data plots are shown time-aligned with the time axis. It also allows to convert the sound data to different form, for example, stereo sound to mono sound. For speech analysis purpose, it does well to provide useful information.

What it Does Poorly

Although WaveSurfer records the sound, it is not for enjoying the music, so the quality of the recording is not so great. If there is  background noise, the recorded sound is not clear. Also the sound from the computer is recorded just like the sound from outside, so the quality of the sound is not good.

What happens when you...

WaveSurfer is basically for speech sound. When I tried to load and visualize the song, the instrumental music part was shown something like the background noise. The human voice part was visualized different from the instrumental music, but the waveform was little bit different from the speech sound.  

Additional Resources

KTH also developed a few softwares for music.

http://www.speech.kth.se/music/performance/download/