CHAPTER FOUR: SOUNDS (All about Sounds)

Introduction

Sound is perhaps the most important 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. Sound is the terminology used in the analog
form, and the digitized form of sound is called as audio.

POWER OF SOUND

When something vibrates in the air is moving back and forth it creates wave of pressure. These waves
spread like ripples from pebble tossed into a still pool and when it reaches the eardrums, the change of
pressure or vibration is experienced as sound. Acoustics is the branch of physics that studies sound.
Sound pressure levels 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.

Multimedia Sound Systems

The multimedia application user can use sound right off the bat on both the Macintosh and on a
multimedia, PC running Windows because beeps and warning sounds are available as soon as the
operating system is installed. On the Macintosh you can choose one of the several sounds for the system
alert. In Windows system sounds are WAV files and they reside in the windows\Media subdirectory.
There are still more choices of audio if Microsoft Office is installed. Windows makes use of WAV files as
the default file format for audio and Macintosh systems use SND as default file format for audio.

Digital Audio

Digital audio is created when a sound wave is converted into numbers – a process referred to as
digitizing. It is possible to digitize sound from a microphone, a synthesizer, existing tape recordings, live
radio and television broadcasts, and popular CDs. You can digitize sounds from a natural source or
prerecorded. Digitized sound is sampled sound. Ever 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.

Preparing Digital Audio Files

Preparing digital audio files is fairly straight forward. If you have analog source materials – music or
sound effects that you have recorded on analog media such as cassette tapes.

• The first step is to digitize the analog material and recording it onto a computer readable digital media.

• It is necessary to focus on two crucial aspects of preparing digital audio files:

• Balancing the need for sound quality against your available RAM and Hard disk resources.

• Setting proper recording levels to get a good, clean recording.

Remember that the sampling rate determines the frequency at which samples will be drawn for the
recording. Sampling at higher rates more accurately captures the high frequency content of your sound.
Audio resolution determines the accuracy with which a sound can be digitized.

FORMULA FOR DETERMINING THE SIZE OF THE DIGITAL AUDIO

Monophonic = Sampling rate * duration of recording in seconds * (bit resolution / 8) * 1

Stereo = Sampling rate * duration of recording in seconds * (bit resolution / 8) * 2

Editing Digital Recordings

Once a recording has been made, it will almost certainly need to be edited. The basic sound editing
operations that most multimedia procedures needed are described in the paragraphs that follow

1. Multiple Tasks: Able to edit and combine multiple tracks and then merge the tracks and export
them in a final mix to a single audio file.
2. Trimming: Removing dead air or blank space from the front of a recording and an unnecessary
extra time off the end is your first sound editing task.
3. Splicing and Assembly: Using the same tools mentioned for trimming, you will probably want to
remove the extraneous noises that inevitably creep into recording.
4. Volume Adjustments: If you are trying to assemble ten different recordings into a single track
there is a little chance that all the segments have the same volume.
5. Format Conversion: In some cases, your digital audio editing software might read a format
different from that read by your presentation or authoring program.
6. Resampling or down-sampling: If you have recorded and edited your sounds at 16-bit sampling
rates but are using lower rates you must resample or down-sample the file.
7. Equalization: Some programs offer digital equalization capabilities that allow you to modify a
recording frequency content so that it sounds brighter or darker.
8. Digital Signal Processing: Some programs allow you to process the signal with reverberation,
multitap delay, and other special effects using DSP routines.
9. Reversing Sounds: Another simple manipulation is to reverse all or a portion of a digital audio
recording. Sounds can produce a surreal, other worldly effect when played backward.
10. Time Stretching: Advanced programs let you alter the length 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.

Making MIDI Audio

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a communication standard developed for electronic
musical instruments and computers. MIDI files allow music and sound synthesizers from different
manufacturers to communicate with each other by sending messages along cables connected to the
devices. Creating your own original score can be one of the most creative and rewarding aspects of
building a multimedia project, and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the quickest, easiest
and most flexible tool for this task.

The process of creating MIDI music is quite different from digitizing existing audio. To make MIDI scores,
however you will need sequencer software and a sound synthesizer.

The MIDI keyboard is also useful to simply the creation of musical scores. An advantage of structured
data such as MIDI is the ease with which the music director can edit the data.

A MIDI file format is used in the following circumstances:

 Digital audio will not work due to memory constraints and more processing power requirements
 When there is high quality of MIDI source
 When there is no requirement for dialogue.
 A digital audio file format is preferred in the following circumstances:  When there is no control
over the playback hardware
 When the computing resources and the bandwidth requirements are high.
  When dialogue is required.

Audio File Formats

A file format determines the application that is to be used for opening a file.

Following is the list of different file formats and the software that can be used for opening a specific file.

1. *.AIF, *. SDII in Macintosh Systems

2. *.SND for Macintosh Systems

3. *.WAV for Windows Systems

4. MIDI files – used by north Macintosh and Windows

5. *.WMA –windows media player

6. *.MP3 – MP3 audio

7. *.RA – Real Player

8. *.VOC – VOC Sound

9. AIFF sound format for Macintosh sound files

10.*.OGG – Ogg Vorbis

RED BOOK STANDARD

The method for digitally encoding the high-quality stereo of the consumer CD music market is an
instrument standard, ISO 10149. This is also called as RED BOOK standard.

The developers of this standard claim that the digital audio sample size and sample rate of red book
audio allow accurate reproduction of all sounds that humans can hear. The red book standard
recommends audio recorded at a sample size of 16 bits and sampling rate of 44.1 KHz.

SOFTWARE USED FOR AUDIO

Software such as Toast and CD-Creator from Adaptec can translate the digital files of red book Audio
format on consumer compact discs directly into a digital sound editing file, or decompress MP3 files into
CD-Audio. There are several tools available for recording audio. Following is the list of different software
that can be used for recording and editing audio

 Sound recorder from Microsoft