Getting frequency response of my microphone - matlab

I'm trying to get a frequency response curve from a microphone that I have connected to my pc, using matlab.
I think I'm pretty close of getting the final code, but i think I'm missing something.
This is what I have right now:
close all, clear all, clc
x = 5; % seconds recording
Fs = 44100; % Sampling frequency
T = 1/Fs; % Sample time
L= x*1000; % Length of signal
t = (0:L-1)*T; % Time vector
% Record your voice for 'x' seconds.
recObj = audiorecorder(Fs, 24, 1);
disp('Start of Recording.');
recordblocking(recObj, x);
disp('End of Recording.');
% Store data in double-precision array.
myRecording = getaudiodata(recObj);
NFFT = 2^nextpow2(L); % Next power of 2 from length of y
fourier = fft(myRecording);
Y = fft(myRecording,NFFT)/L;
f = Fs/2*linspace(0,1,NFFT/2+1);
X = 2*abs(Y(1:NFFT/2+1));
samples = get(recObj,'TotalSamples');
plot(f,X)
title('Single-Sided Amplitude Spectrum)
xlabel('Frequency (Hz)')
ylabel('|Y(f)|')
This part of the code is correct I think.
For example, when I play a tone of 5kHz I get this plot:
Now I play pink noise, and add this small part of code to convert it to dB, so I can get the frequency response curve:
dbX = db(X);
plot(f,dbX)
I expect (or my goal is..) a frequency response curve (as you can find on google images for example, I don't have enough reputation for more than 2 links, so sorry I didn't use a picture link here) , but I got this instead:
Clearly I'm doing something wrong, but I don't know what ..

You are closer than you think. Here are three tips to get a little closer.
Firstly, you need a logarithmic plot of your frequency domain data. Use semilogx() instead of plot.
Secondly, you're going to need to smooth the data. The simplest function for this in Matlab is smooth() but there are more advanced options that may better suit your needs.
Finally, in order to get a relative response, subtract the mean from your data. dbx_relative = dbx-mean(dbx)
Putting it all together:
dbX = db(X);
relative_dbx = dbx-mean(dbx);
smoothed_dbx = smooth(relative_dbx);
semilogx(f,smoothed_dbx);

Use pwelch to compute the transfer function between the stimulus signal (i.e. the reference audio waveform ) and the response (what you measure with your microphone).

Related

period of sawtooth from measurements

I have a series of 2D measurements (time on x-axis) that plot to a non-smooth (but pretty good) sawtooth wave. In an ideal world the data points would form a perfect sawtooth wave (with partial amplitude data points at either end). Is there a way of calculating the (average) period of the wave, using OCTAVE/MATLAB? I tried using the formula for a sawtooth from Wikipedia (Sawtooth_wave):
P = mean(time.*pi./acot(tan(y./4))), -pi < y < +pi
also tried:
P = mean(abs(time.*pi./acot(tan(y./4))))
but it didn't work, or at least it gave me an answer I know is out.
An example of the plotted data:
I've also tried the following method - should work - but it's NOT giving me what I know is close to the right answer. Probably something simple and wrong with my code. What?
slopes = diff(y)./diff(x); % form vector of slopes for each two adjacent points
for n = 1:length(diff(y)) % delete slope of any two points that form the 'cliff'
if abs(diff(y(n,1))) > pi
slopes(n,:) = [];
end
end
P = median((2*pi)./slopes); % Amplitude is 2*pi
Old post, but thought I'd offer my two-cent's worth. I think there are two reasonable ways to do this:
Perform a Fourier transform and calculate the fundamental
Do a curve-fitting of the phase, period, amplitude, and offset to an ideal square-wave.
Given curve-fitting will likely be difficult because of discontinuities in saw-wave, so I'd recommend Fourier transform. Self-contained example below:
f_s = 10; # Sampling freq. in Hz
record_length = 1000; # length of recording in sec.
% Create noisy saw-tooth wave, with known period and phase
saw_period = 50;
saw_phase = 10;
t = (1/f_s):(1/f_s):record_length;
saw_function = #(t) mod((t-saw_phase)*(2*pi/saw_period), 2*pi) - pi;
noise_lvl = 2.0;
saw_wave = saw_function(t) + noise_lvl*randn(size(t));
num_tsteps = length(t);
% Plot time-series data
figure();
plot(t, saw_wave, '*r', t, saw_function(t));
xlabel('Time [s]');
ylabel('Measurement');
legend('measurements', 'ideal');
% Perform fast-Fourier transform (and plot it)
dft = fft(saw_wave);
freq = 0:(f_s/length(saw_wave)):(f_s/2);
dft = dft(1:(length(saw_wave)/2+1));
figure();
plot(freq, abs(dft));
xlabel('Freqency [Hz]');
ylabel('FFT of Measurement');
% Estimate fundamental frequency:
[~, idx] = max(abs(dft));
peak_f = abs(freq(idx));
peak_period = 1/peak_f;
disp(strcat('Estimated period [s]: ', num2str(peak_period)))
Which outputs a couple of graphs, and also the estimated period of the saw-tooth wave. You can play around with the amount of noise and see that it correctly gets a period of 50 seconds till very high levels of noise.
Estimated period [s]: 50

How to find the frequency of a periodic sound signal?

I'm working on sound signals of a walking pattern, which has obvious regular patterns:
Then I thought I can get the frequency of walking (approximately 1.7Hz from the image) using FFT function:
x = walk_5; % Walking sound with a size of 711680x2 double
Fs = 48000; % sound frquency
L=length(x);
t=(1:L)/Fs; %time base
plot(t,x);
figure;
NFFT=2^nextpow2(L);
X=fft(x,NFFT);
Px=X.*conj(X)/(NFFT*L); %Power of each freq components
fVals=Fs*(0:NFFT/2-1)/NFFT;
plot(fVals,Px(1:NFFT/2),'b','LineSmoothing','on','LineWidth',1);
title('One Sided Power Spectral Density');
xlabel('Frequency (Hz)')
ylabel('PSD');
But then it doesn't give me what I expected:
FFT result:
zoom image has lots of noises:
and there is no information near 1.7Hz
Here is the graph from log domain using
semilogy(fVals,Px(1:NFFT));
It's pretty symmetric though:
I couldn't find anything wrong with my code. Do you have any solutions to easily extract the 1.7Hz from the walking pattern?
here is the link for the audio file in mat
https://www.dropbox.com/s/craof8qkz9n5dr1/walk_sound.mat?dl=0
Thank you very much!
Kai
I suggest you to forget about DFT approach since your signal is not appropriate for this type of analysis due to many reasons. Even by looking on the spectrum in range of frequencies that you are interested in, there is no easy way to estimate the peak:
Of course you could try with PSD/STFT and other funky methods, but this is an overkill. I can think of two, rather simple methods, for this task.
First one is based simply on the Auto Correlation Function.
Calculate the ACF
Define the minimum distance between them. Since you know that expected frequency is around 1.7Hz, then it corresponds to 0.58s. Let's make it 0.5s as the minimum distance.
Calculate the average distance between peaks found.
This gave me an approximate frequency of 1.72 Hz .
Second approach is based on the observation to your signal already has some peaks which are periodic. Therefore we can simply search for them using findpeaks function.
Define the minimum peak distance in a same way as before.
Define the minimum peak height. For example 10% of maximum peak.
Get the average difference.
This gave me an average frequency of 1.7 Hz.
Easy and fast method. There are obviously some things that can be improved, such as:
Refining thresholds
Finding both positive and negative peaks
Taking care of some missing peaks, i.e. due to low amplitude
Anyway that should get you started, instead of being stuck with crappy FFT and lazy semilogx.
Code snippet:
load walk_sound
fs = 48000;
dt = 1/fs;
x = walk_5(:,1);
x = x - mean(x);
N = length(x);
t = 0:dt:(N-1)*dt;
% FFT based
win = hamming(N);
X = abs(fft(x.*win));
X = 2*X(1:N/2+1)/sum(win);
X = 20*log10(X/max(abs(X)));
f = 0:fs/N:fs/2;
subplot(2,1,1)
plot(t, x)
grid on
xlabel('t [s]')
ylabel('A')
title('Time domain signal')
subplot(2,1,2)
plot(f, X)
grid on
xlabel('f [Hz]')
ylabel('A [dB]')
title('Signal Spectrum')
% Autocorrelation
[ac, lag] = xcorr(x);
min_dist = ceil(0.5*fs);
[pks, loc] = findpeaks(ac, 'MinPeakDistance', min_dist);
% Average distance/frequency
avg_dt = mean(gradient(loc))*dt;
avg_f = 1/avg_dt;
figure
plot(lag*dt, ac);
hold on
grid on
plot(lag(loc)*dt, pks, 'xr')
title(sprintf('ACF - Average frequency: %.2f Hz', avg_f))
% Simple peak finding in time domain
[pkst, loct] = findpeaks(x, 'MinPeakDistance', min_dist, ...
'MinPeakHeight', 0.1*max(x));
avg_dt2 = mean(gradient(loct))*dt;
avg_f2 = 1/avg_dt2;
figure
plot(t, x)
grid on
hold on
plot(loct*dt, pkst, 'xr')
xlabel('t [s]')
ylabel('A')
title(sprintf('Peak search in time domain - Average frequency: %.2f Hz', avg_f2))
Here's a nifty solution:
Take the absolute value of your raw data before taking the FFT. The data has a ton of high frequency noise that is drowning out whatever low frequency periodicity is present in the signal. The amplitude of the high frequency noise gets bigger every 1.7 seconds, and the increase in amplitude is visible to the eye, and periodic, but when you multiply the signal by a low frequency sine wave and sum everything you still end up with something close to zero. Taking the absolute value changes this, making those amplitude modulations periodic at low frequencies.
Try the following code comparing the FFT of the regular data with the FFT of abs(data). Note that I took a few liberties with your code, such as combining what I assume were the two stereo channels into a single mono channel.
x = (walk_5(:,1)+walk_5(:,2))/2; % Convert from sterio to mono
Fs = 48000; % sampling frquency
L=length(x); % length of sample
fVals=(0:L-1)*(Fs/L); % frequency range for FFT
walk5abs=abs(x); % Take the absolute value of the raw data
Xold=abs(fft(x)); % FFT of the data (abs in Matlab takes complex magnitude)
Xnew=abs(fft(walk5abs-mean(walk5abs))); % FFT of the absolute value of the data, with average value subtracted
figure;
plot(fVals,Xold/max(Xold),'r',fVals,Xnew/max(Xnew),'b')
axis([0 10 0 1])
legend('old method','new method')
[~,maxInd]=max(Xnew); % Index of maximum value of FFT
walkingFrequency=fVals(maxInd) % print max value
And plotting the FFT for both the old method and the new, from 0 to 10 Hz gives:
As you can see it detects a peak at about 1.686 Hz, and for this data, that's the highest peak in the FFT spectrum.

All-pass FIR filter with random phase, MATLAB

so I have the following code for an all-pass FIR filter in matlab, I have a couple of quesitons.
Firstly is the way I convolute the two together correct? The resulting signal is a few samples longer than the original.
Secondly how would I go about getting a magnitude vs. phase diagram like this one? from the coefficients I have already?
Magnitude and Phase
%% Initialise
clear all
close all
N=256;% filter tap length
Fs = 44100; %# Samples per second
toneFreq = 50; %# Tone frequency, in Hertz
nSeconds = 2; %# Duration of the sound
y = sin(linspace(0, nSeconds*toneFreq*2*pi, round(nSeconds*Fs)));
rng(1, 'twister');%
a=pi/2;
b=-a;
%% method
A = ones(N,1);%magnitude response set to 1
B = (b-a).*rand(N,1) + a;% random phase
hf=A.*(cos(B)+1j*sin(B)); %create coefficients
hn=ifft(hf); %convert to time domain
final=conv(hn,input); %filter?
Use conv(x,y,'same'). You can use help conv or doc conv to see it's documentation. RTM
If you have the signal processing toolbox, use freqz. Again, RTM.

How to convert a speech spectrum to time domain

I am doing speech analysis. I recorded the sound for 5 seconds. Applied Hamming window, DC offsetting and normalising and using fft took the spectrum. I want to hear how much the sound has changed. So is there a way to convert the fft back to time domain?
clc,clear;
% Record your voice for 5 seconds.
%recObj = audiorecorder;
recObj = audiorecorder(96000, 16, 1);
disp('Start speaking.')
recordblocking(recObj,5);
disp('End of Recording.');
% Play back the recording.
play(recObj);
get(recObj);
myspeech = getaudiodata(recObj);
wavwrite(double(myspeech),96000,'C://Users//naveen//Desktop//unprocessed')
% Store data in double-precision array.
myRecording = getaudiodata(recObj);
% Store data in double-precision array.
myRecording = getaudiodata(recObj);
% Plot the samples.
figure,plot(myRecording),title('Original Sound');
%Offset Elimination
a = myRecording;
a=double(a);
D = a-mean(a);
figure,plot(myRecording),title('Sound after Offset Elimination');
%normalizing
w = D/max(abs(D));
figure,plot(w),title('Normalized Sound');
% hamming window
a1=double(w);
%a1=a1';
N=length(w);
hmw = hamming(N);
temp = a1.*hmw;
a1 = temp;
%Fast Fourier Transform
a2=double(a1);
N=length(a1);
n=ceil(log2(N));
nz=2^n;
fs = 96000;
x_z=0*[1:nz];
x_z(1:N)=a2;
X=fft(x_z);
x1=abs(X);
wq=double(0:nz-1)*(fs/nz);
figure,stem(wq,x1),title('Spectrum');
xlabel('Frequency (Hz)');
ylabel('Magnitude of FFT Coefficients');
nz1=round(nz/2)
x2=x1(1:nz1);
w1=wq(1:nz1);
figure,plot(w1,x2);
title('Half Length Spectrum of Sound');
nz2=nz1*10;
Like you do fft you can also apply ifft which is the inverse of the fourier transform (http://www.mathworks.es/es/help/matlab/ref/ifft.html)
Using the abs() function on complex data is a lossy operation which throws away any phase information. The phase information encodes the waveform shapes and well as the timing of any transients in the FFT window. Since that information has been discarded, a magnitude spectrum or spectrogram alone can't be turned back into audio that sounds like the original speech.
But if you keep the full complex results of the FFT, then a complex IFFT might be used in some sort of resynthesis process.

MATLAB FFT xaxis limits messing up and fftshift

This is the first time I'm using the fft function and I'm trying to plot the frequency spectrum of a simple cosine function:
f = cos(2*pi*300*t)
The sampling rate is 220500. I'm plotting one second of the function f.
Here is my attempt:
time = 1;
freq = 220500;
t = 0 : 1/freq : 1 - 1/freq;
N = length(t);
df = freq/(N*time);
F = fftshift(fft(cos(2*pi*300*t))/N);
faxis = -N/2 / time : df : (N/2-1) / time;
plot(faxis, real(F));
grid on;
xlim([-500, 500]);
Why do I get odd results when I increase the frequency to 900Hz? These odd results can be fixed by increasing the x-axis limits from, say, 500Hz to 1000Hz. Also, is this the correct approach? I noticed many other people didn't use fftshift(X) (but I think they only did a single sided spectrum analysis).
Thank you.
Here is my response as promised.
The first or your questions related to why you "get odd results when you increase the frequency to 900 Hz" is related to the Matlab's plot rescaling functionality as described by #Castilho. When you change the range of the x-axis, Matlab will try to be helpful and rescale the y-axis. If the peaks lie outside of your specified range, matlab will zoom in on the small numerical errors generated in the process. You can remedy this with the 'ylim' command if it bothers you.
However, your second, more open question "is this the correct approach?" requires a deeper discussion. Allow me to tell you how I would go about making a more flexible solution to achieve your goal of plotting a cosine wave.
You begin with the following:
time = 1;
freq = 220500;
This raises an alarm in my head immediately. Looking at the rest of the post, you appear to be interested in frequencies in the sub-kHz range. If that is the case, then this sampling rate is excessive as the Nyquist limit (sr/2) for this rate is above 100 kHz. I'm guessing you meant to use the common audio sampling rate of 22050 Hz (but I could be wrong here)?
Either way, your analysis works out numerically OK in the end. However, you are not helping yourself to understand how the FFT can be used most effectively for analysis in real-world situations.
Allow me to post how I would do this. The following script does almost exactly what your script does, but opens some potential on which we can build . .
%// These are the user parameters
durT = 1;
fs = 22050;
NFFT = durT*fs;
sigFreq = 300;
%//Calculate time axis
dt = 1/fs;
tAxis = 0:dt:(durT-dt);
%//Calculate frequency axis
df = fs/NFFT;
fAxis = 0:df:(fs-df);
%//Calculate time domain signal and convert to frequency domain
x = cos( 2*pi*sigFreq*tAxis );
F = abs( fft(x, NFFT) / NFFT );
subplot(2,1,1);
plot( fAxis, 2*F )
xlim([0 2*sigFreq])
title('single sided spectrum')
subplot(2,1,2);
plot( fAxis-fs/2, fftshift(F) )
xlim([-2*sigFreq 2*sigFreq])
title('whole fft-shifted spectrum')
You calculate a time axis and calculate your number of FFT points from the length of the time axis. This is very odd. The problem with this approach, is that the frequency resolution of the fft changes as you change the duration of your input signal, because N is dependent on your "time" variable. The matlab fft command will use an FFT size that matches the size of the input signal.
In my example, I calculate the frequency axis directly from the NFFT. This is somewhat irrelevant in the context of the above example, as I set the NFFT to equal the number of samples in the signal. However, using this format helps to demystify your thinking and it becomes very important in my next example.
** SIDE NOTE: You use real(F) in your example. Unless you have a very good reason to only be extracting the real part of the FFT result, then it is much more common to extract the magnitude of the FFT using abs(F). This is the equivalent of sqrt(real(F).^2 + imag(F).^2).**
Most of the time you will want to use a shorter NFFT. This might be because you are perhaps running the analysis in a real time system, or because you want to average the result of many FFTs together to get an idea of the average spectrum for a time varying signal, or because you want to compare spectra of signals that have different duration without wasting information. Just using the fft command with a value of NFFT < the number of elements in your signal will result in an fft calculated from the last NFFT points of the signal. This is a bit wasteful.
The following example is much more relevant to useful application. It shows how you would split a signal into blocks and then process each block and average the result:
%//These are the user parameters
durT = 1;
fs = 22050;
NFFT = 2048;
sigFreq = 300;
%//Calculate time axis
dt = 1/fs;
tAxis = dt:dt:(durT-dt);
%//Calculate frequency axis
df = fs/NFFT;
fAxis = 0:df:(fs-df);
%//Calculate time domain signal
x = cos( 2*pi*sigFreq*tAxis );
%//Buffer it and window
win = hamming(NFFT);%//chose window type based on your application
x = buffer(x, NFFT, NFFT/2); %// 50% overlap between frames in this instance
x = x(:, 2:end-1); %//optional step to remove zero padded frames
x = ( x' * diag(win) )'; %//efficiently window each frame using matrix algebra
%// Calculate mean FFT
F = abs( fft(x, NFFT) / sum(win) );
F = mean(F,2);
subplot(2,1,1);
plot( fAxis, 2*F )
xlim([0 2*sigFreq])
title('single sided spectrum')
subplot(2,1,2);
plot( fAxis-fs/2, fftshift(F) )
xlim([-2*sigFreq 2*sigFreq])
title('whole fft-shifted spectrum')
I use a hamming window in the above example. The window that you choose should suit the application http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_function
The overlap amount that you choose will depend somewhat on the type of window you use. In the above example, the Hamming window weights the samples in each buffer towards zero away from the centre of each frame. In order to use all of the information in the input signal, it is important to use some overlap. However, if you just use a plain rectangular window, the overlap becomes pointless as all samples are weighted equally. The more overlap you use, the more processing is required to calculate the mean spectrum.
Hope this helps your understanding.
Your result is perfectly right. Your frequency axis calculation is also right. The problem lies on the y axis scale. When you use the function xlims, matlab automatically recalculates the y scale so that you can see "meaningful" data. When the cosine peaks lie outside the limit you chose (when f>500Hz), there are no peaks to show, so the scale is calculated based on some veeeery small noise (here at my computer, with matlab 2011a, the y scale was 10-16).
Changing the limit is indeed the correct approach, because if you don't change it you can't see the peaks on the frequency spectrum.
One thing I noticed, however. Is there a reason for you to plot the real part of the transform? Usually, it is abs(F) that gets plotted, and not the real part.
edit: Actually, you're frequency axis is only right because df, in this case, is 1. The faxis line is right, but the df calculation isn't.
The FFT calculates N points from -Fs/2 to Fs/2. So N points over a range of Fs yields a df of Fs/N. As N/time = Fs => time = N/Fs. Substituting that on the expression of df you used: your_df = Fs/N*(N/Fs) = (Fs/N)^2. As Fs/N = 1, the final result was right :P