Broadcasting arrays

Without knowing it, you might have broadcasted arrays. In a nutshell, NumPy tries to perform an operation even though the operands do not have the same shape. In this recipe, we will multiply an array and a scalar. The scalar is "extended" to the shape of the array operand and then the multiplication is performed. We will download an audio file and make a new version that is quieter.

How to do it...

Let's start by reading a WAV file:

1. Reading a WAV file.

   We will use a standard Python code to download an audio file of Austin Powers called "Smashing, baby". SciPy has a wavfile module, which allows you to load sound data or generate WAV files. If SciPy is installed, then we should have this module already. The read function returns a data array and sample rate. In this example, we only care about the data:

   sample_rate, data = scipy.io.wavfile.read(WAV_FILE)

2. Plot the original WAV data.

   Plot the original WAV data with Matplotlib. Give the subplot the title Original.

   matplotlib.pyplot...