Estimate volume from extracted pulse

Hello,

I have extracted a pulse from an audio signal and would like to see if I can determine volume from each pulse. Does anyone have an idea of how to do this? I worked with trapz to find the area under the curve but was wondering if there was another way, or a better way. I need to relate these pulses to measurements of volume.

Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

Since you are dealing with vectors and not functions, trapz (or cumtrapz, depending on the result you want) is likely the only way to get the areas under each curve.

I am not certain what you are referring to with respect to ‘volume’, since that implies a third dimension.

[Kcire L]

What about power or intensity? Could I characterize these pulses in terms of power (i.e. this pulse with this duration and amplitude produces this much power)?

Thanks again for the response.

[Star Strider]

My pleasure.

Power is amplitude squared by definition, so square them first and then integrate them.

Another possibility is to calculate the RMS (root-mean-squared) value of each one. Calculate that by taking the square root of the mean of the squared values of each waveform:

RMS = sqrt(mean(waveform.^2))

where ‘waveform’ is each record (vector). That is likely better than simply integrating them, in that it is an accepted method of standardising them.