WAV audio file handling in SciPy - Mini Project: Build & Apply

WAV Audio File Handling with SciPy

📖 Scenario: You have recorded a short sound clip and saved it as a WAV audio file. You want to analyze this audio file by loading it into your program, checking its properties, and then extracting some useful information.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to load a WAV audio file using SciPy, check its sample rate and data shape, and extract the first 100 audio samples.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use SciPy's wavfile module to read WAV files

Access the sample rate and audio data from the file

Extract a slice of the audio data

Print the sample rate and the extracted audio samples

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Audio processing is common in music apps, voice assistants, and sound analysis tools. Loading and inspecting WAV files is the first step in these tasks.

💼 Career

Understanding how to handle audio files is useful for data scientists working in audio analytics, speech recognition, and multimedia applications.

1

Load the WAV audio file

Write code to import wavfile from scipy.io and read the WAV file named example.wav using wavfile.read. Store the sample rate in a variable called sample_rate and the audio data in a variable called audio_data.

SciPy

# Import wavfile and read 'example.wav' to get sample_rate and audio_data
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use from scipy.io import wavfile to import the module. Then use wavfile.read('example.wav') to read the file.

2

Check the sample rate and audio data shape

Write code to create two variables: rate that stores the value of sample_rate, and shape that stores the shape of audio_data using its shape attribute.

SciPy

from scipy.io import wavfile
sample_rate, audio_data = wavfile.read('example.wav')
# Create variables rate and shape from sample_rate and audio_data.shape
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign rate = sample_rate and shape = audio_data.shape.

3

Extract the first 100 audio samples

Write code to create a variable called first_100_samples that contains the first 100 elements of audio_data using slicing.

SciPy

from scipy.io import wavfile
sample_rate, audio_data = wavfile.read('example.wav')
rate = sample_rate
shape = audio_data.shape
# Extract the first 100 samples from audio_data into first_100_samples
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use slicing like audio_data[:100] to get the first 100 samples.

4

Print the sample rate and first 100 samples

Write code to print the sample rate stored in rate and the first 100 audio samples stored in first_100_samples. Use two separate print statements.

SciPy

from scipy.io import wavfile
sample_rate, audio_data = wavfile.read('example.wav')
rate = sample_rate
shape = audio_data.shape
first_100_samples = audio_data[:100]
# Print the sample rate and first 100 samples
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(rate) and print(first_100_samples) to display the values.