Natural Sound - Resonance

  • It is easy to produce sound that contains a jumble of frequencies: wind, impulse/rattling/vibrating

  • A resonant cavity is a filter: amplifies frequencies near its wavelength (and multiples), suppresses other frequencies

  • Most sound-producing things operate in/with a resonant cavity: voice, instruments, etc

Natural Sound — Voice

  • The human vocal tract

  • Sound source ("vocal chords") + resonant cavity (larynx, mouth, etc)

  • Frequency range unsurprisingly similar to hearing range

Natural Sound — Acoustic Instruments

  • Noisemaker + resonant cavity

    • Wind: buzzing lips or reed + tube

    • String: vibrating string + usually cavity

    • Percussion: impulse + usually cavity

    • Misc

  • Pitch adjustment by tension or length; cavity length modification via holes (or slide) — so many choices

  • Most but not all monophonic: one sound at a time

Analog Sound — Electrical Representation

  • Represent sound pressure as a voltage on a wire

  • The classic: telephone

  • Allows for transmission, processing

Analog Sound — Distortion

  • Ideally, electric signal exactly represents sound pressure

  • In practice, the signal path may introduce distortion

    • Nonlinearity: the signal doesn't accurately track the sound pressure

    • History: the past signal influences the current signal

  • We will talk about "harmonic distortion" (THD) at some point

Analog Sound — Attenuation / Amplification

  • Simplest transformation

  • Attenuation: Sound out linearly less than sound in

  • Easy to attenuate in all the obvious ways

  • Amplification: Sound out linearly greater than sound in

  • Amplification usually requires electronics

Analog Sound — Speakers

  • Turn electrical signal into air pressure change

  • Wire solenoid attached to paper cone like this

  • Typically in a resonant cavity (speaker cabinet)

  • Speaker solenoid roughly tracks change in current through the wire

  • Need wavelength to be long for low frequency: big speaker or pair of separated speakers (long baseline) — "woofer"

  • Need response time to be fast for high frequency: tiny speaker, maybe piezoelectric — "tweeter"

Analog Sound — Recording

  • Turn sound into electrical signal: usually with microphone

  • Microphone varies resistance, capacitance or voltage (reversed speaker) depending on air pressure differential between front and back

  • Many variations on this theme

  • Microphones are bad: noisy, nonlinear devices; usually limiting factor in sound chain

Analog Sound — Signal Path

  • We now know how to build something like a telephone or record player or stomp box:

    • Use a microphone to convert air pressure to voltage

    • Maybe process the voltage somehow: store it somewhere or modify it with circuitry

    • Use a speaker to convert voltage back to sound

Analog Sound — Feedback

  • "Feedback" is a classic oscillation effect:

    • Sound coming out the speaker and back into the microphone interacts with speaker + microphone + air as a resonance

    • The resonant frequency depends on the distance between microphone and speaker

    • If the loop has net positive gain at some frequency (amplification)…

Analog Sound — Limitations

  • Representation of analog sound as an electrical signal is potentially awesome: high accuracy in time, can represent very high and low frequencies well

  • In practice, there are problems:

    • Any "noise" (unwanted signal) is also very accurately represented

    • Analog signal storage devices are clunky, and don't work well: records, tapes, etc

    • Manipulating electrical signals requires complex and expensive and special-purpose electronics

    • "Audiophiles" love this stuff, so you have to deal with them (could be worst problem)

Digital Sound — Discretization

  • "Digitizing" analog sound solves our problems:

    • Somewhat noise-immune

    • Can be stored in digital memory

    • Can be manipulated with a simple computer

    • Audiophiles hate it

  • What representation should we choose? Discretize analog signal in time and space as "samples"

  • Simplest to use uniform sampling time interval, binary integer representation of sample values

    • High sampling rates and lots of bits is more accurate, but "wasteful" for slowly-varying signals

  • This is often called "Pulse Code Modulation" (PCM), and is the basis of most ("time-domain") digital representations of sound

  • Usually PCM is "Linear Pulse Code Modulation" (LPCM): the binary sample values are interpreted directly. Sometimes a function is used to transform the sample values (e.g. A-law, μ-law) to try to use fewer bits with a decent representation: see below

Digital Sound — Nyquist Limit

  • Sound is a fundamentally frequency-domain (sum of sinusoids) thing: PCM treats it as time-domain

  • A particularly striking example of this is the "Nyquist Limit"

  • To make PCM work well, we need to ensure that we don't try to represent signals that vary quickly relative to the sampling rate

  • Specifically, we need to ensure that frequencies above half the sample rate are not present in the underlying signal (this is a strange way of putting things, but the math checks out)

  • We will return to this topic throughout the course

Digital Sound — PCM Representation

  • Sound is represented as sequence of samples: numbers

    • Usually fixed-width integers: signed or unsigned

    • Floating point can also be a thing

    • Units are complicated: usually just normalized to range of values for int and 0..1 or -1..1 for float

  • There is some specified sample rate in samples per second: note that samples per second is 2× max frequency in Hz, because Nyquist

  • Stereo (or more), so sample-per-channel, interleaved in the "obvious" way: frames

Digital Sound — Sources Of "Approximation"

  • Band-limited via Nyquist (approximation in time)

  • Quantization due to finite representation (approximation in amplitude)

  • Assumes an idealized sampling clock — clock "skew" and "jitter" is a thing for real clocks

Digital Sound — Digital To Analog Conversion

  • Need to take a binary number to a voltage

  • Classic method: direct conversion via R/2R Ladder

    • Very fast, simple

    • Accuracy issues are real: bit voltages and component values must be matched pretty exactly

  • Classic method: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)

    • Digital all the way to single-wire output

    • Arbitrary resolution dependent on timing

    • Really hard to get the filtering right for audio applications: want super-high pulse rate

  • Fancy methods: can talk about later if folks are interested

Digital Sound — Analog To Digital Conversion

  • Convert voltage on wire to binary number

  • This is the "hard" direction: the DAC tricks aren't invertible

  • One common approach uses some combination of DACs and comparators to try to make the DAC output match the analog input

  • Discussion

Let's Make Some Noise

  • Build a WAV file with a sinewave in it. (spec)

  • The "hello world" of digital audio.

  • demo

Last modified: Monday, 8 April 2019, 8:11 PM