Introduction to Multimedia

SOUND
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Outline
 Introduction to sound
 Digital audio
 MIDI audio
 Digital audio vs MIDI audio
 Multimedia System Sound
 Audio file formats

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What is SOUND?

When a bird flaps its

 Sound is a form of energy that wings, a sound is
travels in waves. produced

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

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

 ‘Acoustics’ is the branch of

physics that studies sound.

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The Power of Sound
• 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 called rarefaction.
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The Power of Sound
 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

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Sound Waves
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.

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Sound Waves Properties
 Wavelength:
distance between waves

 Amplitude:
strength/height of waves
(volume)

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

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Characteristic of Sound Waves

 Sound is described in terms of two characteristics:

 Frequency (or pitch)
 Amplitude (or loudness)

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Frequency
 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.

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Amplitude
 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

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Amplitude
 Loudness or volume are measured in decibel (dB).

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Digital Audio
 To get audio into a computer, we have to digitize the
waveform (convert it into a series of bits).
101010111100000
 Need to convert from Analog-to-Digital.

Digitization
An analog signal continually A digital signal is a series of
fluctuates in voltage up and numbers, with discrete
down (waveform) amplitudes

 Digitization involves sampling and quantization.

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Sampling
 Divide the horizontal axis (the x dimension) into
discrete pieces.
 Decide on sample rate - number of samples point
taken per second (Hz).

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Sampling
• Consider this waveform.

• What sampling rate should we choose?

6 samples 11 samples 21 samples

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Digital Audio
The higher the sampling rate, the more the measurements are taken
(better quality).
The lower the sampling rate, the lesser the measurements are taken
(low quality).

High Sampling Rate Samples stored in digital

form

Waveform

Low Sampling Rate

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Digital Audio
 The three sampling frequencies most often used in multimedia
are
 44.1 kHz
 22.05 kHz
 11.025 kHz.

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Quantization
 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”

 2 bit quantization divides the vertical axis into 4 levels.
16 bit quantization divides the vertical axis into 65536 levels.

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Quantization and Clipping
Quantization
 Produce an unwanted background hissing noise.

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

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Making Digital Audio Files
Quality factors for digital audio file :
1. Sampling Rate
 How often the samples are taken (measured in kilohertz).
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

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Digital Audio
 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.

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Making Digital Audio Files
Basic Recording Software
• Multimedia sound is either
- Digitally recorded audio
- MIDI (Musical Instrumental Digital Interface) music.

• Mac and Windows have built in sound recorders

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Sound Editing Applications
 This basic sound editing application could:
 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.
 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.

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Digital Audio
 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

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Midi Audio
 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.

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Midi Audio
 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.

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To make MIDI scores, you will need:-

1) Notation software - for composers 2) Sequencer software – A device of

and musicians to create and arrange a computer program that record, edit,
scores using MIDI instruments. and save music generated from a MIDI
keyboard or instruments and blend it
. with digital audio e.g Garageband (Mac)

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To make MIDI scores, you will need:-
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.

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Midi Keyboard
 MIDI keyboard is used to simplify the creation of music scores
(MIDI information)

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Midi Audio
 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.

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Audio File Formats

 MIDI
 *.MID, *.KAR, *.MIDI, *.SMF

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

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MIDI Versus Digital Audio
MIDI DIGITAL AUDIO
Analogous to structured or vector Digitized audio is analogous to
graphics bitmapped images
Device dependent - File sound better Device independent - Quality of sound
than digital audio files when played on depends on sample rate and sample
a high-quality MIDI device size (resolution)

File size is much smaller than digitized File size is larger than MIDI file
audio - MIDI files embedded in web
pages load and play more quickly.

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

MIDI does not have consistent Digital audio provides consistent

playback quality playback quality
One requires skills and knowledge of Digital audio does not have this
music theory in order to run MIDI requirement
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Multimedia System Sounds
 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

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Advantage and Disadvantages of
using Audio
Advantages Disadvantages
Ensure important information is Easily overused.
noticed.

Add interest. Requires special equipment for

quality production.

Can communicate more directly than Not as memorable as visual media.

other media.

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Factors considered before adding Sound to
MM Project
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.

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Summary
 There are two main types of digital audio
 Sampled audio

 Captured by sampling an analogue waveform at

a set rate
 MIDI data

 Instructions on how to perform some musical

composition
 Sampled audio requires more storage space than
MIDI information

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