Spring 2024
Signals and Noise
File size of whale song
Learn It!
Pre-Requisite Knowledge
Goal
How much memory does the whalesong take up?
How much data used to store the whale song as uncompressed audio?
The maximum frequency of blue whale songs is less than 50 Hz. Based on this information, what is the minimum amount of memory required to store 1 hour of a blue whale song if it is stored as a single channel of uncompressed audio using 16 bit quantization? (Use \(1 MB = 10^6 B\))
Part 1
Arranging terms
This problem suggests that we use dimensional analysis. There are many "this per that" units, and few directly applicable equations that we know about this. We know that sampling rates will come into play at some point based on the context of the question.
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1A
Dimensional Analysis
\(\frac{16 \cdot 100 \cdot 3600 \cdot 1 }{8 \cdot 10^6}=0.72MB\)
Multiply everything together and we get less than a Megabyte.
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!
But a 3-minute MP3 is bigger than that!