The program is intended to simplify the recording and basic editing of speech waveforms as well as to present the spectrogram and the time waveform in a side-by-side format for ease of analysis.
Getting Started:
Before you can do any recording through Record, you will need to connect a microphone or other sound source to the microphone input on your sound card. The next step is to ensure that your computer is set up to record from the microphone. On a Windows machine, you must select the microphone as the source in the Record Control window. The Record Control window can usually be accessed from a speaker icon in the system tray.
Running the program:
The program can be run by typing record at the MATLAB prompt or by opening the program in the MATLAB editor and selecting Run from the Debug menu
Recording:
Sound recording is initiated through the MATLAB graphical user interface (GUI) by clicking on the record button. The duration of the recording can be adjusted to be anywhere from 1 to 6 seconds. (These are the GUI defaults, but the code can be modified to record for longer durations if desired.)
Upon being clicked, the record button executes a function that reads in mono data from the microphone jack on the sound card and stores it a MATLAB vector.
Most of the important information in a typical voice waveform is found below a frequency of about 4 kHz. Accordingly, we should sample at a least twice this frequency, or 8 kHz. (Note that all sound cards have a built in pre-filter to limit the effects of aliasing.) Since there is at least some valuable information above 4 kHz, the Record GUI has a default sampling rate of 16 kHz (however, the waveforms portrayed in this document were sampled at 11.025 kHz).
Once recorded, the time data is normalized to maximum amplitude of 0.99 and displayed on the upper plot in the GUI window. In addition to the time domain waveform, a spectrogram is computed using MATLAB's built in specgram function (part of the signal processing toolbox).
Zooming in on the Waveform:
One can examine a region of interest in the waveform using the Zoom in button. When Zoom in is clicked, the cursor will change to a cross hair. Clicking the left mouse button and dragging a rectangle around the region of interest in the time domain waveform will select a sub-section of data.
Zooming out:
The Zoom out button will change the axis back to what it was before Zoom in was used. If you zoom in multiple times, zooming out will return you to the previous axis limits.
Listening to the Waveform:
The Play button uses MATLAB's sound function to play back (send to the speakers) the waveform that appears in the GUI. If you have zoomed in on a particular section of the waveform, only that portion of the waveform will be sent to the speakers.
Saving and Loading Data:
Save is used to write the waveform to a wave file. If zoomed in on segment of data, only that portion of the waveform will be saved.
Click Load to import any mono wave file into the Record GUI for analysis.
For a full description, see:
http://www.ele.uri.edu/~hansenj/projects/record/ |
