Reading *.wav files in Python

python audio wav wave
Roman picture Roman · Jan 13, 2010 · Viewed 202.1k times · Source

I need to analyze sound written in a .wav file. For that I need to transform this file into set of numbers (arrays, for example). I think I need to use the wave package. However, I do not know how exactly it works. For example I did the following:

import wave
w = wave.open('/usr/share/sounds/ekiga/voicemail.wav', 'r')
for i in range(w.getnframes()):
    frame = w.readframes(i)
    print frame

As a result of this code I expected to see sound pressure as function of time. In contrast I see a lot of strange, mysterious symbols (which are not hexadecimal numbers). Can anybody, pleas, help me with that?

Answer

Alex Martelli picture Alex Martelli · Jan 14, 2010

Per the documentation, scipy.io.wavfile.read(somefile) returns a tuple of two items: the first is the sampling rate in samples per second, the second is a numpy array with all the data read from the file:

from scipy.io import wavfile
samplerate, data = wavfile.read('./output/audio.wav')

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