Audio Beat Detection in C#

Using System.IO BinaryReader object found in .NET mscorlib assembly, I ran a loop that dumped each byte value from a .wav file into Excel spreadsheet. For simplicity sake, I recorded a two second 4K signal from signal generator into software sequencer and saved as monaural wave file. The software I sequence music with shows a resolution of 1ms - which is 44.11 samples(assuming 44.1K sample rate). What I find curious is that the data extracted via ReadInt16() method(starting at position 44 in .wav file) shows varied numbers with integers switching signs seemingly at random- whereas the visual sine wave within sequencer is completely unif开发者_如何学Pythonorm with respect to amplitude and frequency. With 16 bit resolution, I determined that for each sample first byte was frequency resolution and the second amplitude, is correct?

Question: How can I intelligently interpret the integers pulled from wave file for the ultimate purpose of determining rhythmic beats?

Many thanks...........Mickey

For a WAV file with 16 bits per sample, it is not the case that the first byte of the sample is frequency resolution and the second byte is amplitude. Both bytes together indicate the sample's amplitude at that specific point in time. The two bytes are interpreted as a 2-byte integer, so the values will range from -32768 to +32767.

I do not know how your sequencer works or what it is displaying. From your description, it sounds as if your sequencer is using FFT to convert the audio from time-domain (which is what a WAV file is) to frequency-domain (which is a graph with frequency along the x-axis and frequency amplitude along the y-axis). A WAV file does not contain frequency information.