audio-course/pr_239/en/chapter1/preprocessing.md

Preprocessing an audio dataset

Loading a dataset with 🤗 Datasets is just half of the fun. If you plan to use it either for training a model, or for running inference, you will need to pre-process the data first. In general, this will involve the following steps:

• Resampling the audio data
• Filtering the dataset
• Converting audio data to model's expected input

Resampling the audio data

The load_dataset function downloads audio examples with the sampling rate that they were published with. This is not always the sampling rate expected by a model you plan to train, or use for inference. If there's a discrepancy between the sampling rates, you can resample the audio to the model's expected sampling rate.

Most of the available pretrained models have been pretrained on audio datasets at a sampling rate of 16 kHz. When we explored MINDS-14 dataset, you may have noticed that it is sampled at 8 kHz, which means we will likely need to upsample it.

To do so, use 🤗 Datasets' cast_column method. This operation does not change the audio in-place, but rather signals to datasets to resample the audio examples on the fly when they are loaded. The following code will set the sampling rate to 16kHz:

from datasets import Audio

minds = minds.cast_column("audio", Audio(sampling_rate=16_000))

Re-load the first audio example in the MINDS-14 dataset, and check that it has been resampled to the desired sampling rate:

minds[0]

Output:

{
    "path": "/root/.cache/huggingface/datasets/downloads/extracted/f14948e0e84be638dd7943ac36518a4cf3324e8b7aa331c5ab11541518e9368c/en-AU~PAY_BILL/response_4.wav",
    "audio": {
        "path": "/root/.cache/huggingface/datasets/downloads/extracted/f14948e0e84be638dd7943ac36518a4cf3324e8b7aa331c5ab11541518e9368c/en-AU~PAY_BILL/response_4.wav",
        "array": array(
            [
                2.0634243e-05,
                1.9437837e-04,
                2.2419340e-04,
                ...,
                9.3852862e-04,
                1.1302452e-03,
                7.1531429e-04,
            ],
            dtype=float32,
        ),
        "sampling_rate": 16000,
    },
    "transcription": "I would like to pay my electricity bill using my card can you please assist",
    "intent_class": 13,
}

You may notice that the array values are now also different. This is because we've now got twice the number of amplitude values for every one that we had before.

💡 Some background on resampling: If an audio signal has been sampled at 8 kHz, so that it has 8000 sample readings per second, we know that the audio does not contain any frequencies over 4 kHz. This is guaranteed by the Nyquist sampling theorem. Because of this, we can be certain that in between the sampling points the original continuous signal always makes a smooth curve. Upsampling to a higher sampling rate is then a matter of calculating additional sample values that go in between the existing ones, by approximating this curve. Downsampling, however, requires that we first filter out any frequencies that would be higher than the new Nyquist limit, before estimating the new sample points. In other words, you can't downsample by a factor 2x by simply throwing away every other sample — this will create distortions in the signal called aliases. Doing resampling correctly is tricky and best left to well-tested libraries such as librosa or 🤗 Datasets.

Filtering the dataset

You may need to filter the data based on some criteria. One of the common cases involves limiting the audio examples to a certain duration. For instance, we might want to filter out any examples longer than 20s to prevent out-of-memory errors when training a model.

We can do this by using the 🤗 Datasets' filter method and passing a function with filtering logic to it. Let's start by writing a function that indicates which examples to keep and which to discard. This function, is_audio_length_in_range, returns True if a sample is shorter than 20s, and False if it is longer than 20s.

MAX_DURATION_IN_SECONDS = 20.0

def is_audio_length_in_range(input_length):
    return input_length 

Now you can see what the audio input to the Whisper model looks like after preprocessing.

The model's feature extractor class takes care of transforming raw audio data to the format that the model expects. However,
many tasks involving audio are multimodal, e.g. speech recognition. In such cases 🤗 Transformers also offer model-specific
tokenizers to process the text inputs. For a deep dive into tokenizers, please refer to our [NLP course](https://huggingface.co/course/chapter2/4).

You can load the feature extractor and tokenizer for Whisper and other multimodal models separately, or you can load both via
a so-called processor. To make things even simpler, use `AutoProcessor` to load a model's feature extractor and processor from a
checkpoint, like this:

```py
from transformers import AutoProcessor

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small")

Here we have illustrated the fundamental data preparation steps. Of course, custom data may require more complex preprocessing. In this case, you can extend the function prepare_dataset to perform any sort of custom data transformations. With 🤗 Datasets, if you can write it as a Python function, you can apply it to your dataset!