How get sound input from microphone in python, and process it on the fly?

Question

Greetings,

I'm trying to write a program in Python which would print a string every time it gets a tap in the microphone. When I say 'tap', I mean a loud sudden noise or something similar.

I searched in SO and found this post: Recognising tone of the audio

I think PyAudio library would fit my needs, but I'm not quite sure how to make my program wait for an audio signal (realtime microphone monitoring), and when I got one how to process it (do I need to use Fourier Transform like it was instructed in the above post)?

Thank you in advance for any help you could give me.

Answer 1

If you are using LINUX, you can use pyALSAAUDIO. For windows, we have PyAudio and there is also a library called SoundAnalyse.

I found an example for Linux here:

#!/usr/bin/python
## This is an example of a simple sound capture script.
##
## The script opens an ALSA pcm for sound capture. Set
## various attributes of the capture, and reads in a loop,
## Then prints the volume.
##
## To test it out, run it and shout at your microphone:

import alsaaudio, time, audioop

# Open the device in nonblocking capture mode. The last argument could
# just as well have been zero for blocking mode. Then we could have
# left out the sleep call in the bottom of the loop
inp = alsaaudio.PCM(alsaaudio.PCM_CAPTURE,alsaaudio.PCM_NONBLOCK)

# Set attributes: Mono, 8000 Hz, 16 bit little endian samples
inp.setchannels(1)
inp.setrate(8000)
inp.setformat(alsaaudio.PCM_FORMAT_S16_LE)

# The period size controls the internal number of frames per period.
# The significance of this parameter is documented in the ALSA api.
# For our purposes, it is suficcient to know that reads from the device
# will return this many frames. Each frame being 2 bytes long.
# This means that the reads below will return either 320 bytes of data
# or 0 bytes of data. The latter is possible because we are in nonblocking
# mode.
inp.setperiodsize(160)

while True:
    # Read data from device
    l,data = inp.read()
    if l:
        # Return the maximum of the absolute value of all samples in a fragment.
        print audioop.max(data, 2)
    time.sleep(.001)