Voice At 700 Bits Per Second

All other things being equal, signals with wider bandwidth can carry more information. Sometimes that information is data, but sometimes it is frequency. AM radio stations (traditionally) used about 30 kHz of bandwidth, while FM stations consume nearly 200 kHz. Analog video signals used to take up even more space. However, your brain is a great signal processor. To understand speech, you don’t need very high fidelity reproduction.

Radio operators have made use of that fact for years. Traditional shortwave broadcasts eat up about 10kHz of bandwidth, but by stripping off the carrier and one sideband, you can squeeze the voice into about 3 kHz and it still is intelligible. Typical voice codecs (that is, something that converts speech to digital data and back) use anywhere from about 6 kbps to 64 kbps.

[David Rowe] wants to change that. He’s working on a codec for ham radio use that can compress voice to 700 bits per second. He is trying to keep the sound quality similar to his existing 1,300 bit per second codec and you can hear sound samples from both in his post. You’ll notice the voices sound almost like old-fashioned speech synthesis, but it is intelligible.

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Decoding MP3 In Python

We all listen to them, but do you know how the compression for an MP3 file actually works? [Portalfire] wanted to find out, while honing his Python skills at the same time. He’s been working on an MP3 decoder in the Python language. So far he’s had some success, with the first working decoder clocking in at just 34 times slower than real-time. But since then a bit of optimization improved that to 10 times slower.

Sure, it’s not a usable module yet but his goal of learning the algorithms has been reached. A combination of reading about the standard and looking at code from other projects made that possible. In the future he plans to try the same thing with the H.264 codec.