Reading Wave Files

On the Windows platform, the most common file extension for audio files is "wav". MATLAB can
read such wave files via the command "wavread". The following example reads the wave file
"sunday.wav" and display its waveform directly.

Example 1.
[y, fs]=wavread('sunday.wav');
sound(y, fs); % Playback of the sound data (?????)
time=(1:length(y))/fs; % Time vector on x-axis (??????)
plot(time, y)

In the above example, "fs" is the sample rate which is 16000 in this case. This indicates
that there are 44100 samples per second when the clip was recorded. The vector "y" is a
column vector containing the samples of the speech signals. We can use "sound(y, fs)"
to play the audio signals read from the file. "time" is a time vector in which each element
corresponds to the time of each sample. Therefore we can plot "y" against "t" to show the
waveform directly.
Most audio signals are digitized to have a bit resolution of 8 or 16 bits. If we want to know
the bit resolution of the input wave file, we can use an extra output arguments to
"wavread" to obtain the information, such as
[y, fs, nbits]=wavread(sunday.wav');
Moreover, if we want to know the time duration of a stream of audio signals, we can use
"length(y)/fs" directly. The following example can obtain most of the important information
of the wave file "sunday.wav".
Example 2
fileName='sunday.wav';
[y, fs, nbits]=wavread(fileName);
sound(y, fs); % Playback of the sound data (?????)
time=(1:length(y))/fs; % Time vector on x-axis (??????)
plot(time, y)
fprintf('Information of the sound file "%s":\n', fileName);
fprintf('Duration = %g seconds\n', length(y)/fs);
fprintf('Sampling rate = %g samples/second\n', fs);
fprintf('Bit resolution = %g bits/sample\n', nbits);

From the above example, it can be observed that all the audio signals are between -1
and 1. However, each sample point is represented by an 8-bit interger. How are they
related? First of all, we need to know the following convention:

1. If a wave file has a bit resolution of 8 bits, then each sample point is stored as an
unsigned integer between 0 and 255 (= 2^8-1).
2. If a wave file has a bit resolution of 16 bits, then each sample point is stored as an
unsigned integer between -32768 (= 2^16/2) and 32767 (= 2^16/2-1).
Since almost all variables in MATLAB have the data type of "double", therefore all
samples are converted into a floating-point number between -1 and 1 for easy
manipulation. Therefore to retrieve the original integer values of the audio signals, we can
proceed as follows.
1. For 8-bit resolution, we can multiply "y" (the value obtained by wavread) by 128
and then plus 128.
2. For 16-bit resolution, we can multiply "y" (the value obtained by wavread) by
32768.
Here is an example.
Example 3
fileName='sunday.wav';
[y, fs, nbits]=wavread(fileName);
y0=y*(2^nbits/2)+(2^nbits/2); % y0 is the original values stored in the wav
file
difference=sum(abs(y0-round(y0)))

In the above example, the difference is zero, indicating the retrived y0 contains no fractional parts.

We can also use the command "wavread" to read a stereo wave file. The returned variable will
be a matrix of 2 columns, each containing the audio signals from a single channel. Example
follows.

Example 4

fileName='flanger.wav';
[y, fs]=wavread(fileName); % Read wave file
sound(y, fs); % Playback
left=y(:,1); % Left channel
right=y(:,2); % Right channel
subplot(2,1,1), plot((1:length(left))/fs, left);
subplot(2,1,2), plot((1:length(right))/fs, right);

In the above example, MATLAB will read the wave file "flanger.wav", play the stereo sound, and
plot two streams of audio signals in two subplots. Since the intensities of these two channels are
more or less complemntary to each other, which gives an illusion that the sound source is moving
back and forth between two speakers.

If the wave file is too large to be read into memory directly, we can also use "wavread" to read a
part of the audio signals directly. See the following example.