WaveSurfer
Encyclopedia
WaveSurfer is an audio editor widely used for studies of acoustic phonetics
. It is a simple but fairly powerful program for interactive display of sound pressure waveforms, spectral sections, spectrograms, pitch tracks and transcriptions. It can read and write a number of transcription file formats used in industrial speech research including TIMIT
.
WaveSurfer is free software
, distributed under a permissive free software licence
.
.
. It therefore runs on most platforms, including Microsoft Windows
, Mac OS X
, Linux
, Solaris, HP-UX
, FreeBSD
, and IRIX
. It is scriptable and supports plugins.
Acoustic phonetics
Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the relationship...
. It is a simple but fairly powerful program for interactive display of sound pressure waveforms, spectral sections, spectrograms, pitch tracks and transcriptions. It can read and write a number of transcription file formats used in industrial speech research including TIMIT
TIMIT
TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of American English speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time....
.
WaveSurfer is free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
, distributed under a permissive free software licence
Permissive free software licence
A permissive free software licence is a class of free software licence with minimal requirements about how the software can be redistributed. This is in contrast to copyleft licences, which have reciprocity / share-alike requirements. Both sets of free software licences offer the same freedoms in...
.
Features
Wavesurfer provides basic audio editing operations, such as excision, copying, pasting, zero-crossing adjustment, and effects such as fading, normalization, echo, inversion, reversal, replacement with silence, and DC-removal, but, in view of its scientific orientation, does not offer effects of interest to musicians such as flangeFlanging
Flanging is an audio effect produced by mixing two identical signals together, with one signal delayed by a small and gradually changing period, usually smaller than 20 milliseconds. This produces a swept comb filter effect: peaks and notches are produced in the resultant frequency spectrum,...
.
Development
Wavesurfer is written in Tcl/Tk using the Snack audio librarySnack audio library
The Snack Sound Toolkit is a cross-platform library written by Kåre Sjölander of the Swedish Royal Technical University with bindings for the scripting languages Tcl, Python, and Ruby...
. It therefore runs on most platforms, including Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
, Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, Solaris, HP-UX
HP-UX
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...
, FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
, and IRIX
IRIX
IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. It was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. IRIX was the first operating system to include the XFS file system.The last major version...
. It is scriptable and supports plugins.