There are many reasons for and ways of analysing recordings, depending whether you are - for example - an audio engineer, producer, performer, composer, music information retrieval scientist, or musicologist. And it doesn't stop there: musicologists have different reasons for and ways of analysing recordings, ranging from quite informal methods of close listening (as illustrated in books like Robert Philip's Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900-1950 to the use of computational techniques of measurement. The purpose of this section isn't to provide a comprehensive and balanced account of methods for analysing recordings: we have attempted to provide that in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (see in particular Nicholas Cook's chapter 'Methods for analysing recordings'). Its purpose is rather to enable you to access relevant materials on the CHARM website and to explain their use.

This part of the website is organised into three sections, on Sonic Visualiser, Tools developed by the CHARM Mazurka project, and Other materials.