How to calculate decibel from maxAmplitude, I wrote an android application to get maxAmplitude at regular interval, I need to show the o/p to the user in decibels.
Decibels are a relative unit, they express the power of your signal relative to some reference power.
If you are working with amplitudes, then the formula is:
power_db = 20 * log10(amp / amp_ref);
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel#Field_quantities).
Note also that maximum amplitude is not usually a very good indicator of loudness (or even of power). More typically, you should measure the RMS power of your signal, and convert that to dB instead.
Regular phone microphones aren't calibrated to measure absolute loudness, so it's not possible without also having a sound meter to initially calibrate the phone. As Oli mentions, you may be able to calculate a relative change in loudness, but I expect you want to replicate a real sound level meter.
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I am working on an Android Experiment and I need some help. I want to have a sound play and on movement of the phone, have the sound pitch get higher. (Ex: Move phone up, higher pitch). The sounds will be different depending on the orientation of the device. But how can I have the pitch of the sound get higher or lower depending on the gyro movement / accelerometer movement of the device?
Thanks for any help :)
You have to divide your task into two separate objectives. One is how to obtain the reading from your phone; another is to manipulate the sound output. The first task is straightforward. Search online and find a library or native API to read the device orientation.
Changing the sound pitch is more interesting. First you'll need to structure your program so that you have full control over the output stream. This allows you to change the waveform on the fly. Again, pushing bytes to the I/O is the mechanical part. But first think about the physics of sound.
When you play a clip at 2x the speed, the pitch goes twice as high, but the tempo also doubles. Similarly, slowing down the clip brings down the pitch but the clip takes longer to play. This may be what you want, but if you want to retain the tempo but only to change the pitch, you'll have to perform some wave transformation. You may read more about Pitch Scaling.
We are working on a cross-platform project that requires sound volume sampling on smartphones and analyse the result with as high accuracy as possible, the IPhone developer used iOS implemented functionality of returnning sound power/volume in dB scale calculated by the OS itself. as far as i know there is no equivalent functionality in Android OS.
as of now, I am working on Android with the MediaRecorder class given by the OS, and i use getMaxAmplitude to measure the sound power/volume, i have seen a lot of answers on the net regard how to transfer amplitude to dB scale, the answer that sounded most reasonable was using the formula :
20*Math.log10(amplitude/MAX_AMPLITUDE)
but then i must know what the MAX_AMPLITUDE that can be returned by getMaxAmplitude, thing is that it is diffrent on diffrent devices, for exemple i tested getMaxAmplitude on HTC Desire, and on Samsung Galaxy S3,
on HTC it was reaching 32767 (which i saw in some answer that is the documented max), and on the S3 it was not going beyond 16383 (half of the HTC).
Q1 :
is this(the approach discussed above) the correct approach? its just that I read that the correct way to measure sound power/volume is by calculating RSM and then convert it to dB, is this how its done on IPhone?
Q2 :
no metter if i use RSM or just the Amplitude from getMaxAmplitude, it seems to me that i still need to know whats the highest amplitude i can get from the record hardware, is there a way to know that? or is there a way to somehow go around it?
90dBspl is an rms value in the acoustic domain.
The digital level of 2500 rms in a 16bit system is the same as approximately -22dB FS rms (actually -22.35), where 0dBFS rms is a full scale square wave. A full scale sinusoidal in such a system is 0dBFS peak and -3dB FS rms (reaching from -32768 to +32767).
A square wave of +/-2500 can be calculated as:
20 * log ( 2500/32767) = -22.35 dB FS rms
Please note that peaks of sinusoidals are always 3dB higher than the rms level. The only signal that has the same rms and peak level is the square wave.
Now, Android has a requirement of 30dB linearity around 90dBspl, but this linearity shall be +12dB above 90dBspl and -18dB below the same point. Outside this range there can be compression in different ways, depending on which phone model you test.
The guaranteed highest linear level inside an Android phone is -22dBFS +12dB = -10dBFS rms. Above this level it is uncertain. The most common scenario is that the last 7dB of peak headroom are still linear, leading to an acoustic maximum level of 90dBspl + (22-3 dB) = 109dB spl rms for a sinusoidal without clipping (or 112 dB spl peak).
In some phones you will find a peak limiter that reduces the gain above 102dBspl rms. The outcome of this is that you can still record up to the level of saturation for the microphone. This saturation level varies, but it is common to have like 2% distortion at 120dB spl. Above this level the microphone component starts to saturate and clip.
Looking at the other end of the scale:
Small phone microphones are in general noisy. The latest microphones can have a noise floor at -63dB below 0dBPa (94dBspl), but most microphones are between -58 and -60dB below 0dBPa.
How can this be calculated to dBFS rms ?
0dBPa rms is 94dB spl rms. From the statement above we know that 90dBspl rms acoustic level will be recorded at the digital level of -22dBFS rms in Android phones. -63dB below 90dBspl is the same as -22dBFSrms +4dB -63dB = -81dBFSrms. The absolute maximum range of dynamics in a 16 bit system can be approximated to 96dB (or 93dB depending how you see it), so the noise level is at least 12dB above the quantization noise in the digital file.
This is a very important finding for video recording mode. Unfortunately many video applications in Android tend to have too high microphone gain in the recording. This leads to clipping when recording loud music concerts and similar situations. We also know that the microphone itself is good up to at least 120dB. So it would be a good idea for any audio system engineer to make a video recording mode that actually used the whole dynamic range of the microphone. This means that the gain should be set at least 8dB lower. It is always possible to change the rms level afterwards in a video recording if the sound is too soft, but if it is clipped, then you have damaged the recording forever.
So, my message to you programmers is to implement a video recording mode where the acoustic level of 90dB spl rms is recorded at -30dBFSrms or slightly below that. Any maximization can be done afterwards. In this way we could record rock concerts with much better sound. Doing automatic gain control does not help the sound quality. The dynamic range is often too big to be controlled automatically. You get a lot of pumping in the sound. It is better to implement two different video recording modes: Concert mode and speech mode. In speech mode (optimized for a talking person at 1m distance) the recording gain could be even higher than -22dBFSrms for 90dBspl. I would say -12dBFS rms for 90dBspl would be a suitable recording level. (speech at 1m distance has an rms level of approximately 57dB spl and peaks 20-30dB higher).
Björn Gröhn
Audio system engineer at Sony mobile Lund, Sweden
I need to find a way to get the current audio output volume while the phone is making noise on the headphones, this value will be converted to a decibel level. The android API does not appear to have any way of accessing a constant volume level other than a seemingly arbitrary volume setting level, but I dont see a way to convert that to a standard decibel level or "loudness" measurement. I have seen some ways to use the mic for this, but that wont work with headsets very well.
Does anyone know a way to measure either the maximum possible decibel (or some standard) output level to compare against, or possible the voltage being sent to the headset?
Help is welcomed.
Be aware that there are many different meanings of the word 'deciBel'. It is a means of representing some quantity (such as intensity/power/loudness) relative to a reference point. For audio signals inside equipment, or in an audio application, there is a peak level of 0dB. When sound is emitted from a speaker, the perceived loudness is measured as a Sound Pressure Level, often described as 'dB (SPL)' (or weighted variants such as dBA). When you see the tables of values such as rock concerts at 100dB then this is the SPL that is being described. This measurement is itself relative to a reference level.
So what will have available in the API is the buffer of audio data from which you can easily obtain the audio level in terms of the raw signal (which has a maximum of 0dB). You can't however easily convert this to a physical loudness because this will be dependent on the hardware. It will be different between one model of phone and the next, and will depend on the headphones too. The only way of doing this will be to calibrate the phone by measuring with an SPL meter, but then this will give you a result which will only give reasonable results on this particular phone.
I'm doing it like this:
SLmillibel gain_to_attenuation(float volume)
{
SLmillibel volume_mb;
if(volume>=1.0f) volume_mb=SL_MILLIBEL_MAX;
else if(volume<=0.02f) volume_mb=SL_MILLIBEL_MIN;
else
{
volume_mb=M_LN2/log(1.0f/(1.0f-volume))*-1000.0f;
if(volume_mb>0) volume_mb=SL_MILLIBEL_MIN;
}
return volume_mb;
}
I want to determine the volume of an audio signal.
I have found two options:
Compute Root Mean Squared of the amplitude
find the maximum amplitude
Are there advantages to using #1 or #2?
Here is what I am trying to do:
I want my Android to analyze audio from the microphone. I want the device to detect a loud noise. The input is a short [].
If you use the maximum amplitude (2), then your volume level would be determined by a single sample (which you might not even be able to hear). When calculating a value that correlates with your impression of the loudness of the sound such as the Sound Pressure Level or the Sound Power Level you need to use the RMS (1).
Because you ear is not equally sensitive to all frequencies, a better correlate of your perception can be had by using an A-weighting on the signal. Split (filter) the signal in octave bands, calculate the RMS for each band and apply the A-weighting.
If you want to check volume level, just compute its dB Value (I assume the signal is normalized i.e. 1 == maximum level):
level[n] = - 20 x log(1/signal[n]);
However, detecting audio noise is not a trivial task. The most common and simple technique is to use algorithm called NoiseGate which basically compares the signal level with some dB Threshold value - if the signal level is above threshold, then the output is zeroed. But it is unusable in practice; there must be also some Attack and Release times for smooth thresholding otherwise it would affect also a real signal (music, speech) and produce some kind of clipping.
Check Google, it will give you a lot of resources about NoiseGate algorithm and noise removal techniques:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_gate
http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3599661/Adaptive-Noise-Cancellation-using-Java.htm
Please help me calculate decibels from phone microphone. The microphone has a getMaxAmplitude() function. How I can I use it to calculate decibels? I read in some forums that the decibel calculation formula is power_db = 20 * log10(amplitude / reference_amplitude). But I don't understand how to find the reference_amplitude.
In sound, decibel values are referenced to a sound pressure level of 20µPa (20 micro Pascal).
So in your case the reference_amplitude would be the amplitude generated by your microphone in the presence of a sound field with a level of 20µPa.
In practice, to find this level, microphones are often calibrated (using a microphone calibrator) with a signal of some precisely known level (often around 94dB). The amplitude resulting from this calibration signal can then be used to calculate the amplitude for the reference signal (assuming the response of the microphone is linear).
Decibels are a unit widely used to define some quantity relative to something else. There are a number of different types of decibel measurements, depending on what you're trying to describe about the signal you're receiving.
Read this link to get you started, it explains everything you need to know much better than I can!