Eliminating White Noise in Audio using MATLAB

Are you struggling with unwanted background noise, also known as white noise, in your audio recordings? This article will walk you through a step-by-step process on how to get rid of white noise in audio This article will walk you through a step-by-step process on how to get rid of white noise in audio This article will walk you through a step-by-step process on how to get rid of white noise in audio This article will walk you through a step-by-step process on how to get rid of white noise in audio using MATLAB – a high-performance programming language ideal for engineers and scientists.

White noise, which is a random signal with an equal intensity at different frequencies, can be quite irritating when present in audio files. To rectify this issue, follow this easy guide.

Step 1: Load the audio file
To begin with, import the audio file into MATLAB using the 'audioread' function. This command will return the audio data and the sample rate.

[audioData, sampleRate] = audioread('your_audio_file.wav');

Step 2: Convert to the frequency domain
Utilizing the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), convert the time-domain audio signal to the frequency domain.

audioFFT = fft(audioData);

Step 3: Design a noise reduction filter
Create a low-pass or high-pass filter to remove frequencies above or below a threshold, depending on your requirements. Use the 'fir1' function, which would need the desired filter order and the normalized cut-off frequency.

filterOrder = 100;
cutoffFrequency = 0.2;
filterCoefficients = fir1(filterOrder, cutoffFrequency);

Step 4: Apply the filter
Convolve the filter coefficients with the frequency-domain audio signal to reduce the noise.

filteredAudioFFT = conv(audioFFT, filterCoefficients);

Step 5: Convert back to the time domain
Perform the inverse FFT to convert the filtered audio signal back to the time domain.

filteredAudioData = ifft(filteredAudioFFT);

Step 6: Save the filtered audio
Lastly, save the filtered audio to a new file using the 'audiowrite' function.

audiowrite('filtered_audio_file.wav', filteredAudioData, sampleRate);

By following these steps, you should now have a cleaner audio free from unwanted white noise. MATLAB is a powerful tool for engineers and scientists, and it comes in handy when dealing with complex audio signal processing tasks like this.