SOUND

1
 Introduction to sound
 Digital audio
 MIDI audio
 Digital audio vs MIDI audio
 Multimedia System Sound
 Audio file formats

2
 Sound is a form of energy that When a bird flaps its
wings, a sound is
travels in waves.
produced

 It is produced with a vibrating Bee buzz as they fly

object. The motion of materials because of the rapid
or objects causes vibrations. movement of their
wings

 ‘Acoustics’ is the branch of

physics that studies sound.

3
• When an object vibrates it sets
the particles of the medium
around it vibrating.
• When something vibrates in the
air by moving back and forth
(such as the cone of a
loudspeaker), it creates waves of
pressure.
• When a vibrating object
moves forward, it pushes
and compresses the air in
front of it creating a region
of high pressure called
compression.

• When the vibrating object

moves backwards, it creates
a region of low pressure
4
called rarefaction.
Sound is carried to our ears through vibrating air molecules. We
hear sound when a series of air compressions vibrate the
membrane of our ear.

Waves of pressure Ear drums will translate

Something vibrates these changes in wave
in the air forms as sound

waveform

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVhYuqr03IQ

5
Each sound wave has a unique waveform pattern.
 A pleasant sound has a regular wave pattern.
The pattern is repeated over and over.

 But the waves of noise are irregular. They do not have

a repeated pattern.

6
 Wavelength:
distance between
waves

 Amplitude:
strength/height of
waves (volume)

 Frequency: is a measure
of how many vibrations
occur in one second

7
 Sound is described in terms of two
characteristics:
 Frequency (or pitch)
 Amplitude (or loudness)

8
 Frequency is a measure of how many vibrations occur in one
second.
 Frequency is measured in Hertz (abbreviation Hz) and directly
corresponds to the pitch of a sound.
 The more frequent vibration occurs the higher the pitch of the sound.

Low pitch/Low Frequency High pitch/High Frequency

 Optimally, people can hear from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz)
 Sounds below 20 Hz are infrasonic
 Sounds above 20 kHz are ultrasonic.

9
 Amplitude is the strength/height of waves (volume).
 The louder a sound, the more energy it has. This means loud
sounds have a large amplitude.

Quiet Loud

Low amplitude High Amplitude

10
 Loudness or volume are measured in decibel
(dB).

11
 To get audio into a computer, we have to digitize the
waveform (convert it into a series of bits).
101010111100000

 Digitization involves
 Sampling
 Quantization.

12
 Taking a few of the point along the curve.
 Decide on sample rate - number of samples point taken
per second (Hz).
 Divide the horizontal axis (the x dimension) into discrete
pieces.

13
Example:
Sampling rate at 10 Hz = 10 samples per second, a sample every 0.1 seconds

The result is a shape that

approximate but does not
entirely match the original
shape.

14
Example
Sampling rate at 5 Hz = 5 samples per second, a sample every 0.2 seconds

The result is a shape that

approximate but does not
entirely match the original
shape.

15
• The higher the sampling rate is, the more point per second
you record.
 the closer the digital signal sound to the original signal (high
quality)

• The lower the sampling rate is, the fewer point you record.
 the farther the digital signal sound to the original signal (low
quality)

16
• Consider this waveform.

• What sampling rate should we choose?

6 samples 11 samples 21 samples

17
 High Sampling Rate Samples stored in digital
form

Wavefor
m

Low Sampling Rate

18
 The three sampling frequencies most often used in
multimedia are
 44.1 kHz
 22.05 kHz
 11.025 kHz.

19
 Divide the vertical axis (signal strength) into pieces..
 The value of each sample is rounded off to the nearest integer.
 Decide on a “bit depth”.
 The higher the bit depth, the less rounding off.

Example: 1-bit quantization

20
Example: 2-bit quantization

Example: 3-bit quantization

21
Example: 4-bit quantization

The more bits are used, the better quantization become and the
more similar to the original signal.

22
Quantization
Produce an unwanted background hissing noise.

https://dspillustrations.com/pages/posts/misc/how-does-quantization-noise-sound.html

23
Quality factors for digital audio file :
1. Sampling Rate
 How often the samples are taken (measured in kilohertz).
, The more the measurements are taken (better quality). -> the closer the
digital signal
sound to the original signal.

2. Quantization (Resolution)
 The number of bits used to represent the value of a sample in a digitized
signal.
 Using more bits for the sample size yields a recording that sounds more like
its original.

Sampling Rate Quantization

24
 Other than that, it also depends on:
 The quality of original audio source.
 The quality of capture device & supporting
hardware.
 The characteristics used for capture.
 The capability of the playback environment.

25
•Macintosh and Windows have built in sound recorders

26
SOUND

EDITING
This basic sound editing application could:
Trimming - Removing dead air or blank space from the front


APPLICATIONS
of a recording and an unnecessary extra time off the end is
your first sound editing task.
 Splicing and Assembly - remove the extraneous noises that
inevitably creep into recording.
 Volume Adjustments
 Format Conversion - in some cases your digital audio editing
software might read a format different from that read by your
presentation or authoring program.
 Resampling or Down sampling – If we have sound recorded
and edited at 16-bit sampling rate and using lower rates then
RS and DS is necessary, to save disk space.
 Fade-Ins and Fade-Outs- Help to smooth out a beginning and
end of the sound file.
 Equalization- Modify a recording’s frequency so that it sounds
brighter or darker.
 Time stretching – Alter the length (in time) of a sound file
without changing its pitch.

27
 More advanced Digital audio editing software:
 One of the most powerful and professional PC-based
packages is a tool called Sound Forge

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/
 Others audio editing software:
 COOL Edit Pro

 Gold Wave

 PROSONIQ SonicWORX

 Samplitude Studio

28
 File size (bytes) of a digital recording is

Sampling rate * duration of recording (in seconds)*(bit

resolution/8) * number of tracks (1 for mono, 2 for
stereo)
 Example

The file size of a five-second recording sampled at 22

kHz,16-bit stereo (two tracks)?
File size = 22 kHz * 5 * (16/8) * 2
= 440 KB

29
 Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI)

.
 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a
communications standard developed in the early 1980s for
electronic musical instruments and computers.
In this standard, a given piece of music is represented by a
sequence of numbers that specify how the musical instruments
are to be played at different time instances.
MIDI data is not digitized sound; it is a representation of music
stored in numeric form.

https://onlinesequencer.net/

30
 MIDI provides a protocol for passing detailed descriptions
of a musical score, such as the notes, the sequences of
notes, and the instrument that will play these notes.

MIDI score

Musical score

 The length of MIDI files can be change without

changing the pitch of the music or degrading the audio
quality.
 When sent to a MIDI playback device (e.g. synthesizer), this
results in sound. 31
1) Notation software - for composers 2) Sequencer software – A device
and musicians to create and arrange of a computer program that record, edit,
scores using MIDI instruments e.g and save music generated from a MIDI
Sibelius keyboard or instruments and blend it
with digital audio e.g Garageband (Mac)
.

32
3) Sound Synthesizer
A synthesizer is a piano-style keyboard that generates audio signals
that may be converted to sound. Synthesizers may imitate traditional
musical instruments such as piano, flute, vocals, or natural sounds such as
ocean waves; or generate novel electronic timbres
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0UyXpi40TM

Synthesizer
Synthesizers typically built into the software of multimedia players in
most computers and many handheld devices
MIDI allows sound synthesizers from different manufacturers to
communicate with each other by sending messages along cables
connected to the devices.

33
 An advantage of structured data such as MIDI is the ease with which you can
edit the data.
 Example:

Let’s say you have a piece of music being played on a piano, but your client
decides he wants the sound of a saxophone instead. If you had the music in
digitized audio, you would have to re-record and redigitize the music. When
it is in
MIDI data, however, there is a value that designates the instrument to be
used for
playing back the music. To change instruments, you just change that value.

34
 MIDI
 *.MID, *.KAR, *.MIDI, *.SMF

 AUDIO DIGITAL
 WINDOWS  *.WAV
 MACINTOSH  *.AIFF
 UNIX  *.AU
 REALAUDIO  *.RA
 MPEG3  *.MP3

35
MIDI DIGITAL AUDIO
Analogous to structured or vector Digitized audio is analogous to
graphics (both involve instructions bitmapped images (both use
provided to software to be able to sampling of the original analog
re-create the original) medium to create a digital copy)
Device dependent - File sound Device independent - Quality of
better than digital audio files when sound depends on sample rate and
played on a high-quality MIDI sample size (resolution)
device
File size is much smaller than File size is larger than MIDI file
digitized audio - MIDI files
embedded in web pages load and
play more quickly.

It is difficult to playback spoken Digitized audio can do so with ease

dialog
MIDI does not have consistent Digital audio provides consistent
playback quality playback quality
One requires skills and knowledge Digital audio does not have this
36
of music theory in order to run requirement
 System sounds are assigned to various system
events such as startup and warnings, among
others.

 Audio in Macintosh and Windows

 Both Macintosh and Windows PC platform, have the
default system sounds
 MACINTOSH  Chu Toy, Glass, indigo, Laugh, Simple
Beep
 WINDOWS PC  ding.wav, chimes.wav,
logoff.wav,start.wav

37
1. File formats compatible with multimedia authoring software
being used along with delivery mediums, must be determined.
2. Sound playback capabilities offered by end user’s system
must be studied.

3. The type of sound, whether background music, special sound

effects, or spoken dialog, must be decided.
4. Digital audio or MIDI data should be selected on the basis of
the location and time of use.

38
 There are two main types of digital audio
 Digital audio
 Captured by sampling and quantization of an analogue waveform
 MIDI data
 Instructions on how to perform some musical composition

 Digital audio requires more storage space than

MIDI information.

39