Microphone Component¶

Enabled for online use in version 2021.2 onwards

The microphone component provides a way to record sound during an experiment. You can even transcribe the recording to text! Take a look at the documentation on Creating a Google Cloud Speech API key to get started with that.

When using a mic recording, specify the starting time relative to the start of the routine (see start below) and a stop time (= duration in seconds). A blank duration evaluates to recording for 0.000s.

The resulting sound files are saved in .wav format (at the specified sampling frequency), one file per recording. The files appear in a new folder within the data directory (the subdirectory name ends in _wav). The file names include the unix (epoch) time of the onset of the recording with milliseconds, e.g., mic-1346437545.759.wav.

It is possible to stop a recording that is in progress by using a code component. Every frame, check for a condition (such as key ‘q’, or a mouse click), and call the mic.stop() method of the microphone component. The recording will end at that point and be saved.

Parameters¶

Basic¶

namestring: Everything in a PsychoPy^® experiment needs a unique name. The name should contain only letters, numbers and underscores (no punctuation marks or spaces).
startfloat or integer: The time that the stimulus should first play. See Defining the onset/duration of components for details.
stop (duration):: The length of time (sec) to record for. An expected duration can be given for visualisation purposes. See Defining the onset/duration of components for details; note that only seconds are allowed.
Device:: Which microphone device to use

Transcription¶

Transcribe Audio: bool: Whether to transcribe audio recordings and store the data
Online Transcription Backend:: What transcription service to use to transcribe audio Google or built in. Note that in our experience Google has better transcription results, though we highly recommend taking a look at the documentation on Creating a Google Cloud Speech API key to get started.
Transcription Language: string: The language code for your chosen transcription language e.g. English (United States) is “en-US” see list of codes here
Expected Words: list of strings: A list of key words that you want to listen for e.g. [“Hello”, “World”] if blank all words will be listened for.

Data¶

Save onset/offset times: bool: Whether to save the onset and offset times of the component.
Sync timing with screen refresh: bool: Whether to sync the start time of the component with the window refresh.
Output File Type:: File type to save audio as (default is wav).
Speaking Start/Stop Times: bool: Save onset/offset of speech.
Trim Silent: bool: Trim periods of silent from the output file.

Hardware¶

Channels:: Record 1 (mono) or 2 (stereo) channels (auto will save as many as the recording device allows).
Sample Rate (Hz):: Sampling rate of recorded audio.
Max Recording Size (kb):: Max recording size to avoid excessively large output files.