AUDIO

INTRODUCTION
• A multimedia application may require the use of speech,
music and sound effects. These are called audio or sound
element of multimedia.
• Speech is also a perfect way for teaching.
• Audio are of analog and digital types.
• Analog audio or sound refers to the original sound signal.
Computer stores the sound in digital form. Therefore, the
sound used in multimedia application is digital audio.
 INTRODUCTION
• Audio describes any sound or noise in a range the human
ear can hear. An audio signal is measured in hertz and on
a computer is generated using a sound card and heard
through speakers or headphones.

• Any digital information with speech or music stored on

and played through a computer is known as an audio file
or sound file.
 HOW IS AN AUDIO FILE
CREATED?
• To record a voice or music played outside a computer, an
audio file is created using a microphone to record the
sound it detects. The sound is converted to a digital
signal the computer uses to create the audio file.
• Audio files can also be created using software running on
a computer. For example, a person could use an audio
program, like Audacity, to record the sound played in a
video file.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF SOUND
• Sound waves travel at great distances in a very short time, but as the
distance increases the waves tend to spread out. As the sound waves
spread out, their energy simultaneously spreads through an increasingly
larger area. Thus, the wave energy becomes weaker as the distance from
the source is increased.
• Sounds may be broadly classified into two general groups. One group is
NOISE, which includes sounds such as the pounding of a hammer or the
slamming of a door. The other group is musical sounds, or TONES.
• The distinction between noise and tone is based on the regularity of the
vibrations, the degree of damping, and the ability of the ear to recognize
components having a musical sequence. You can best understand the
physical difference between these kinds of sound by comparing the wave
shape of a musical note
 CHARACTERISTICS OF SOUND
• The fundamental characteristics of sound consist of:
pitch, duration, quality and intensity, however, the
character of the sequence of sounds and its arrangement
is what makes music subjectively pleasing and
individually enjoyed.
 PITCH
• Pitch – In music notation, pitch can be described as how high or low the
note is in an audio.
• By comparing the location of where two or more notes are placed
graphically, we look at their relative position to one another and we know
in what direction they are related to each other, in a position of either
higher or lower than another. We make a comparison of the two notes
thereby easily identifying where each note is spatially on the staff by
making a visual distinction. This is made possible through the use of
notation software or by notating music by hand. The example below
shows visually the basic concept of pitch
 DURATION
• Duration – Duration is also a simple concept whereby we make
additional distinctions based upon the linear structure we call time.
• In music, the duration is determined by the moment the tone becomes
audible until the moment the sound falls outside of our ability to hear it or
it simply stops.
• In music notation, a half note is longer than an eighth note, a quarter
note is shorter in duration than a whole note
 DURATION
• Silence is also represented in the chart by the funny little shapes in
between the notes. They are called rests and this is also heard as
silence. Note shapes partially determine the duration of the audible sound
and rest shapes partially determine the duration of silence in music.
• By playing the sound clip you can hear the difference between the tones
in terms of duration, longer or shorter.
 QUALITY
• All sounds that we hear are made up of many overtones in addition to a
fundamental tone, unless the tone is a pure tone produced by a tuning
fork or an electronic device.
• So, in music when a cellist plays a note we not only hear the note as a
fundamental note but we also hear the overtones at the same time.
• By making sounds from different instruments and sounding them
simultaneously we hear a collection of tonal qualities that is broad in
scope however, again we still primarily hear the loudest or the
fundamental tone.
 INTENSITY
• Intensity – Intensity is a measure of the loudness of the tone.
• Assuming that the pitch, duration and tonal quality are the same, we
compare two or more tones based upon loudness or intensity.
• One is louder or quieter than the other. When playing a piano for
instance, if we strike the keys gently we produce a quiet sound. If we
strike them hard we produce a louder sound even though the pitch is the
same.
 AUDIO
• There are a large number of audio formats, but in all the file size (and
quality) depend on:
• Sampling frequency
• Bit depth
• Number of channels (mono, stereo)
• Lossiness of compression
• The easiest way to reduce file size is to switch from stereo to mono. You
immediately lose half the data, and for many audio files it will have only a
small effect on perceived quality.
• Bit depth, or sample size, is the amount of information stored for each point
- equivalent to the bits/pixel in an image file. This is usually 8 or 16 bits.
• Frequency is the number of times per second the sound was sampled - the higher the
frequency, the better the quality. In practice the frequency is usually set at one of a
number of predetermined figures, most commonly 11KHz, 22KHz and 44KHz. 22kHz is very
common in computer sound file formats, 44kHz is the standard for audio compact discs
• The total size of a mono, uncompressed sound file will be the sample rate * bit depth *
duration. Stereo sound will be twice this. For example, a CD quality sound file will be 16
bit, 44KHz, and uncompressed will be about 10.5Mb per minute.

• The most common sound formats found on the Web are WAV, a Microsoft format, and
AU, primarily a UNIX based format, AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) mainly used on
Mac and SGIs, and streamed formats such as RealAudio (.ra).

• Recently MP3 files have become more popular, particularly for storing CD quality audio.
MP3 refers to the MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) layer 3 audio encoding scheme,
which is defined within both the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards. The audio encoding
scheme in MPEG-2 only differs from that in MPEG-1 in that it was extended to support
very low bitrate applications.
• MP3 can provide about 12:1 compression from an 44kHz 16-bit stereo WAV file without
noticeable degradation of sound quality, much higher compression rates can be obtained,
but at a cost of poorer sound quality. However, it is reasonably CPU intensive, encoding
much more so than decoding. MP3 playback is not recommended on machines slower than
a Pentium or equivalent.

• MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files are different from the audio formats
described above. MIDI is a communications standard developed for electronic musical
instruments and computers. In some ways it is the sound equivalent of vector graphics. It is
not digitized sound, but a series of commands which a MIDI playback device interprets to
reproduce the sound, for example the pressing of a piano key. Like vector graphics MIDI files
are very compact, however, how the sounds produced by the MIDI file depend on the
playback device, and it may sound different from one machine to the next. MIDI files are
only suitable for recording music; they cannot be used to store dialogue. They are also more
difficult to edit and manipulate than digitized sound files, though if you have the necessary
skills every detail can be manipulated.