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  3. Spoken Language Processing in Python

Exercise

Splitting stereo audio to mono with PyDub

If you're trying to transcribe phone calls, there's a chance they've been recorded in stereo format, with one speaker on each channel.

As you've seen, it's hard to transcribe an audio file with more than one speaker. One solution is to split the audio file with multiple speakers into single files with individual speakers.

PyDub's split_to_mono() function can help with this. When called on an AudioSegment recorded in stereo, it returns a list of two separate AudioSegment's in mono format, one for each channel.

In this exercise, you'll practice this by splitting this stereo phone call (stereo_phone_call.wav) recording into channel 1 and channel 2. This separates the two speakers, allowing for easier transcription.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Import AudioSegment from pydub.
  • Create an AudioSegment instance stereo_phone_call with stereo_phone_call.wav.
  • Split stereo_phone_call into channels using split_to_mono() and check the channels of the resulting output.
  • Save each channel to new variables, phone_call_channel_1 and phone_call_channel_2.