Bit depth and specgram - assignment I

Here is a short assingement, to work out the meaning of bit depth. Bring it to the next class 10/5.

1. Record a sound using your computer audio recording application. Set the Audio sample size to 8 bits. Do the same using 16 bits. Listen to both sounds. Read them into matlab. Explain where you hear the difference. Can you see this in the waveform plot? Explain.
(To record a sound from internal source, like your midi player, set your recording properties in the volume control-> recording, to SW sytn. To set the sample size, on Windows open sound recorder and go to file->properties and click on "convert now".)

A second short assingment will show how the spectrum of the same musical piece changes with an instument type.

2. use miditoolbox playsound (or nmat2snd directly) to synthesize a midi file with 'fm' or 'shepard' timbre. Do specgram analysis of the resulting sound. Use NFFT=1024 or more. Record the same midi file by using your computer audio card or another synth. (See previous assignemnt for instructions on how this is done). Compare the specgram of this recording to the previous one. Explain the differences.