Multimedia - Sound

Sound
• Sound is perhaps the most sensuous element of multimedia. It is
meaningful “speech” in any language, from a whisper to a scream. It
can provide the listening pleasure of music, the startling accent of
special effects, or the ambience of a mood-setting background. Some
feel-good music powerfully fills the heart, generating emotions of love
or otherwise elevating listeners closer to heaven.
The Power of Sound
• When something vibrates in the air by moving back and forth (such as
the cone of a loudspeaker), it creates waves of pressure. These waves
spread like the ripples from a pebble tossed into a still pool, and when
they reach your eardrums, you experience the changes of pressure, or
vibrations, as sound. In air, the ripples propagate at about 750 miles
per hour, or Mach 1 at sea level.
• Sound waves vary in sound pressure level (amplitude) and in
frequency or pitch.
• Acoustics is the branch of physics that studies sound. Sound pressure
levels (loudness or volume) are measured in decibels (dB); a decibel
measurement is actually the ratio between a chosen reference point
on a logarithmic scale and the level that is actually experienced.
• When you quadruple the sound output power, there is only a 6 dB
increase; when you make the sound 100 times more intense, the
increase in dB is not hundredfold, but only 20 dB.
• The decibel scale, with some
examples, is shown in Table;
notice the relationship between
power (measured in watts) and
dB.
• Sound is energy, just like the waves breaking on a sandy beach, and too much volume can
permanently damage the delicate receiving mechanisms behind your eardrums, typically dulling
your hearing in the 6 kHz range. In terms of volume, what you hear subjectively is not what you
hear objectively. The perception of loudness is dependent upon the frequency or pitch of the
sound: at low frequencies, more power is required to deliver the same perceived loudness as for
a sound at the middle or higher frequency ranges. You may feel the sound more than hear it. For
instance, when the ambient noise level is above 90 dB in the workplace, people are likely to
make increased numbers of errors in susceptible tasks—especially when there is a high-
frequency component to the noise. When the level is above 80 dB, it is quite impossible to use a
telephone. Experiments by researchers in residential areas have shown that a sound generator at
45 dB produces no reaction from neighbors; at 45 to 55 dB, sporadic complaints; at 50 to 60 dB,
widespread complaints; at 55 to 65 dB, threats of community action; and at more than 65 dB,
vigorous community action, possibly more aggressive than when you tested your ringtones on
the bus. This neighborhood research from the 1950s continues to provide helpful guidelines for
practicing rock musicians and multimedia developers today.
Digital Audio
• Digital audio is created when you represent the characteristics of a
sound wave using numbers—a process referred to as digitizing. You can
digitize sound from a microphone, a synthesizer, existing recordings, live
radio and television broadcasts, and popular CD and DVDs. In fact, you
can digitize sounds from any natural or prerecorded source. Digitized
sound is sampled sound. Every nth fraction of a second, a sample of
sound is taken and stored as digital information in bits and bytes. The
quality of this digital recording depends upon how often the samples are
taken (sampling rate or frequency, measured in kilohertz, or thousands
of samples per second) and how many numbers are used to represent
the value of each sample (bit depth, sample size, resolution, or dynamic
range).
• The three sampling rates most often used in
multimedia are 44.1 kHz (CD-quality), 22.05
kHz, and 11.025 kHz. Sample sizes are either
8 bits or 16 bits. The larger the sample size,
the more accurately the data will describe the
recorded sound. An 8-bit sample size provides
256 equal measurement units to describe the
level and frequency of the sound in that slice
of time. A 16-bit sample size, on the other
hand, provides a staggering 65,536 equal
units to describe the sound in that same slice
of time. As you can see in pic, slices of analog
waveforms are sampled at various
frequencies, and each discrete sample is then
stored either as 8 bits or 16 bits (or more) of
data.
• The value of each sample is
rounded off to the nearest
integer (quantization), and if the
amplitude is greater than the
intervals available, clipping of
the top and bottom of the wave
occurs. Quantization can
produce an unwanted
background hissing noise, and
clipping may severely distort the
sound.
Making Digital Audio Files
• Making digital audio files is fairly straightforward on most computers.
Plug a microphone into the microphone jack of your computer. If you
want to digitize archived analog source materials—music or sound
effects that you have saved on videotape, for example—simply plug
the “Line-Out” or “Headphone” jack of the device into the “Line-In”
jack on your computer.
• Set proper recording levels
Editing Digital Recordings
• Once a recording has been
made, it will almost certainly
need to be edited. Audacity is a
free open-source sound editing
application for Windows,
Macintosh, and Linux
(http://audacity.sourceforge.net)
. With such a tool you can create
sound tracks and digital mixes.
• The basic sound editing operations that most multimedia producers need are described in the
paragraphs that follow.
• Trimming.
• Splicing and Assembly
• Volume Adjustments
• Format Conversion
• Resampling or Downsampling
• Fade-ins and Fade-outs
• Equalization
• Time Stretching
• Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
• Reversing Sounds
• Multiple Tracks
Trimming
• Removing “dead air” or blank space from the front of a recording and
any unnecessary extra time off the end is your first sound editing task.
Trimming even a few seconds here and there might make a big
difference in your file size. Trimming is typically accomplished by
dragging the mouse cursor over a graphic representation of your
recording and choosing a menu command such as Cut, Clear, Erase, or
Silence.
• Audio trimming is the process of removing unwanted or unnecessary
parts from an audio file.
Splicing and Assembly
• Using the same tools mentioned for trimming, you will probably want
to remove the extraneous noises that inevitably creep into a
recording. Even the most controlled studio voice-overs require touch-
up. Also, you may need to assemble longer recordings by cutting and
pasting together many shorter ones. In the old days, this was done by
splicing and assembling actual pieces of magnetic tape.
• the process of cutting and separating audio into distinct segments,
which can then be edited individually
Volume Adjustments
• If you are trying to assemble ten different
recordings into a single sound track, there is little
chance that all the segments will have the same
volume. To provide a consistent volume level,
select all the data in the file, and raise or lower the
overall volume by a certain amount. Don’t
increase the volume too much, or you may distort
the file. It is best to use a sound editor to
normalize the assembled audio file to a particular
level, say 80 percent to 90 percent of maximum
(without clipping), or about –16 dB. Without
normalizing to this rule-of-thumb level, your final
sound track might play too softly or too loudly.
Even pros can leave out this important step.
Sometimes an audio CD just doesn’t seem to have
the same loudness as the last one you played, or it
is too loud and you can hear clipping.
Format Conversion
• In some cases, your digital audio editing software might read a format
different from that read by your presentation or authoring program.
Most sound editing software will save files in your choice of many
formats, most of which can be read and imported by multimedia
authoring systems. Data may be lost when converting formats. If, for
example, you have a Digital Rights Management (DRM)–protected
M4P file downloaded from the iTunes store and burn that file to an
Audio CD track, the DRM data will be lost because the Audio CD
format does not provide for DRM data. The now-unprotected tune on
the CD can then be ripped into a playable MP3 format.
Resampling or Downsampling
• If you have recorded and edited your sounds at 16-bit sampling rates
but are using lower rates and resolutions in your project, you must
resample or downsample the file. Your software will examine the
existing digital recording and work through it to reduce the number of
samples. This process may save considerable disk space.
Fade-ins and Fade-outs
• Most programs offer enveloping capability, useful for long sections
that you wish to fade in or fade out gradually. This enveloping helps to
smooth out the very beginning and the very end of a sound file.
Equalization
• Some programs offer digital equalization (EQ) capabilities that allow
you to modify a recording’s frequency content so that it sounds
brighter (more high frequencies) or darker (low, ominous rumbles).
• a technique in music production that adjusts the volume of specific
frequencies within a sound.
Time Stretching
• Advanced programs let you alter the length (in time) of a sound file
without changing its pitch. This feature can be very useful, but watch
out: most time-stretching algorithms will severely degrade the audio
quality of the file if the length is altered more than a few percent in
either direction.
• an audio effect that changes the speed or duration of an audio signal
without affecting its pitch
Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
• DSP is the process of converting analog signals to digital ones, and it
can also refer to a range of sound effects in consumer audio products.
• Some programs allow you to process the signal with reverberation,
multi tap delay, chorus, flange, and other special effects using digital
signal processing (DSP) routines.
Reversing Sounds
• Another simple manipulation is to reverse all or a portion of a digital
audio recording. Sounds, particularly spoken dialog, can produce a
surreal, otherworldly effect when played backward.
Multiple Tracks
• Being able to edit and combine multiple tracks (for sound effects,
voice-overs, music, etc.) and then merge the tracks and export them
in a “final mix” to a single audio file is important.
Digital audio size
• sample rate x duration of recording in seconds x(bit depth or resolution
/8) x 1 or 2
• 1 for mono sound
• 2 for stereo
• Always multiply sample rate in kHz by 1000
• For example, to calculate the size of a 5-minute CD-quality audio file
with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and a 16-bit bit depth, the calculation
would be:
• 16 bits/sample * 44,100 samples/sec * 300 seconds * 2 channels
MIDI Audio
• MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a communications standard
developed in the early 1980s for electronic musical instruments and
computers.
• It allows music and sound synthesizers from different manufacturers to
communicate with each other by sending messages along cables connected
to the devices.
• A MIDI file is a list of time-stamped commands that are recordings of musical
actions (the pressing down of a piano key or a sustain pedal, for example, or
the movement of a control wheel or slider). When sent to a MIDI playback
device, this results in sound. A concise MIDI message can cause a complex
sound or sequence of sounds to play on an instrument or synthesizer; so
MIDI files tend to be significantly smaller (per second of sound delivered to
the user) than equivalent digitized waveform files
MIDI vs. Audio