Not sure what I'm doing wrong here with formatting, but the answer is that I was opening the file incorrectly.
Needs to be:
In [17]: with open('/path/to/audio/files/Track01.mp3.analysis.en', 'rb') as f: ....: audio_object = dill.load(f) # dill module is a very hip wrapper for pickle. # probably not necessary here pickle.load(f) fine