Reading and plotting audio data

Let's take a look at how to read an audio file and visualize the signal. This will be a good starting point, and it will give us a good understanding about the basic structure of audio signals. Before we start, we need to understand that audio files are digitized versions of actual audio signals. Actual audio signals are complex continuous-valued waves. In order to save a digital version, we sample the signal and convert it into numbers. For example, speech is commonly sampled at 44100 Hz. This means that each second of the signal is broken down into 44100 parts, and the values at these timestamps are stored. In other words, you store a value every 1/44100 seconds. As the sampling rate is high, we feel that the signal is continuous when we listen to it on our media players.

How to do it…

1. Create a new Python file, and import the following packages:

   import numpy as np
   import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
   from scipy.io import wavfile

2. We will use the wavfile package to...