soundgen-package: The soundgen package

In soundgen: Sound Synthesis and Acoustic Analysis

The soundgen package

Description

Performs parametric synthesis of sounds with harmonic and noise components such as animal vocalizations or human voice. Also offers tools for audio manipulation and acoustic analysis, including pitch tracking, spectral analysis, audio segmentation, pitch and formant shifting, etc. Includes four interactive web apps for synthesizing and annotating audio, manually correcting pitch contours, and measuring formant frequencies.

Details

Visualization

• spectrogram Ordinary (STFT) spectrograms

• audSpectrogram Auditory spectrograms

• modulationSpectrum Modulation spectra and roughness (see Anikin 2025)

• ssm Self-similarity matrices, acoustic novelty (see Anikin 2026)

• phasegram Nonlinear analysis, phasegrams (see Anikin & Herbst 2025)

Acoustic analysis

• analyze General-purpose acoustic analysis (extracts nearly everything: spectral descriptives, pitch, formants, loudness, roughness, ...)

• segment Audio segmentation, analysis of rhythm and temporal structure of sequences

• getSurprisal Shannon and autocorrelation-based surprisal, Bayesian surprise (see Anikin 2026)

• estimateVTL, schwa Formant analysis (see Anikin et al. 2024)

Interactive acoustic analysis

• pitch_app Manually corrected pitch tracking

• formant_app Manually corrected pitch tracking

• annotation_app Audio annotation

Sound synthesis

• soundgen The main function for sound and voice synthesis (see Anikin 2019)

• soundgen_app Interaction version of the soundgen() function

• morph Morphing of two sounds based on their soundgen code

Sound modification

• normalizeFolder Peak / RMS etc normalization of recordings

• timeStretch, shiftPitch, prosody, shiftFormants Selective modification of fundamental frequency, duration, and/or resonance frequency

• noiseRemoval, compressor, addAM, resample, etc: various audio effects

Vignettes

• https://cogsci.se/soundgen/spectrograms.html

• https://cogsci.se/soundgen/sound_generation.html

• https://cogsci.se/soundgen/acoustic_analysis.html

• https://cogsci.se/soundgen/matching/matching.html

Author(s)

Maintainer: Andrey Anikin [e-mail]

References

• Anikin, A. (2019). Soundgen: an open-source tool for synthesizing nonverbal vocalizations. Behavior Research Methods, 51(2), 778-792.

• Anikin, A., Barreda, S. & Reby, D. (2024) A practical guide to calculating vocal tract length and scale-invariant formant patterns. Behavior Research Methods 56, 5588–5604.

• Anikin, A. (2025) Acoustic estimation of voice roughness. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 87: 1771–1787.

• Anikin, A. & Herbst, C.T. (2025) How to analyze and manipulate nonlinear phenomena in voice recordings. Philosophical Transactions B 380: 20240003.

• Anikin. A. (2026) Measuring surprisal in sound sequences. https://cogsci.se/publications/pdf/anikin_2026_surprisal_preprint.pdf

See Also

Useful links:

• http://cogsci.se/soundgen.html

soundgen documentation built on Feb. 24, 2026, 5:08 p.m.